Markdown

Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber created Markdown in 2004 as an easy-to-read markup language. Markdown is widely used for blogging, instant messaging, and large language models, and also used elsewhere in online forums, collaborative software, documentation pages, and readme files. The initial description of Markdown contained ambiguities and raised unanswered questions, causing implementations to both intentionally and accidentally diverge from the original version. This was addressed in 2014 when long-standing Markdown contributors released CommonMark, an unambiguous specification and test suite for Markdown.

Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber created Markdown in 2004 as an easy-to-read markup language. Markdown is widely used for blogging, instant messaging, and large language models, and also used elsewhere in online forums, collaborative software, documentation pages, and readme files. The initial description of Markdown contained ambiguities and raised unanswered questions, causing implementations to both intentionally and accidentally diverge from the original version. This was addressed in 2014 when long-standing Markdown contributors released CommonMark, an unambiguous specification and test suite for Markdown. ===Standardization=== In 2012, a group of people, including Jeff Atwood and John MacFarlane, launched what Atwood characterised as a standardization effort. A community website now aims to "document various tools and resources available to document authors and developers, as well as implementors of the various Markdown implementations". ===Name=== In September 2014, Gruber objected to the usage of "Markdown" in the name of this effort and it was rebranded as "CommonMark". CommonMark.org published several versions of a specification, reference implementation, test suite, and "[plans] to announce a finalized 1.0 spec and test suite in 2019¹". A finalized 1.0 spec has not been released, as major issues still remain unsolved. ===Adoption=== Nonetheless, several websites and projects have adopted CommonMark, including Codeberg, Discourse, GitHub, GitLab, Reddit, Qt, Stack Exchange (Stack Overflow), and Swift. In March 2016, two relevant informational Internet RFCs were published: === GitHub Flavored Markdown === GitHub had been using its own variant of Markdown since as early as 2009¹, which added support for additional formatting such as tables and nesting block content inside list elements, as well as GitHub-specific features such as auto-linking references to commits, issues, usernames, etc. In 2017, GitHub released a formal specification of its GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM) that is based on CommonMark. It is a strict superset of CommonMark, following its specification exactly except for tables, strikethrough, autolinks and task lists, which GFM adds as extensions. Accordingly, GitHub also changed the parser used on their sites, which required that some documents be changed. For instance, GFM now requires that the hash symbol that creates a heading be separated from the heading text by a space character.

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1378832470 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.