A Guide to Markdown, the Formatting Language of the Internet
Beyond rich text editors: clean, fast, & simple
(Almost) All websites have roots in HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, but its complex tag-based system is overkill for anyone who wants to format content that’s not interested in learning the entire language. First created in 2004 by John Gruber and Aaron Schwartz, Markdown — a play on the ‘M’ in HTML — was created as an alternative to HTML that used minimalist syntax to help created neat and clean formatting. Because it was so accessible to the Internet not as a collection of webpages but as a community, it’s been adopted by platforms all over the web as a quick and feature-rich alternative to clumsy rich text editors.
For instance, consider StackOverflow, perhaps the most popular help site for developers (and a host of other Overflow sites dedicated to science, politics, mathematics, and more). Question-asking is formatted using markdown, and both questions and answers that properly use a diverse set of markdown commands are more likely to get answered or upvoted.
Reddit, often described as the breeding ground of Internet culture, uses…
