markdown basics

Markdown is intended to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is feasible.

Readability, however, is emphasized above all else. A Markdown-formatted
document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking
like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While
Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML
filters – including Setext, atx, Textile, reStructuredText,
Grutatext, and EtText – the single biggest source of
inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.

To this end, Markdown’s syntax is comprised entirely of punctuation
characters, which punctuation characters have been carefully chosen so
as to look like what they mean. E.g., asterisks around a word actually
look like emphasis. Markdown lists look like, well, lists. Even
blockquotes look like quoted passages of text, assuming you’ve ever
used email.

Inline HTML

Markdown’s syntax is intended for one purpose: to be used as a
format for writing for the web.

Markdown is not a replacement for HTML, or even close to it. Its
syntax is very small, corresponding only to a very small subset of
HTML tags. The idea is not to create a syntax that makes it easier
to insert HTML tags. In my opinion, HTML tags are already easy to
insert. The idea for Markdown is to make it easy to read, write, and
edit prose. HTML is a publishing format; Markdown is a writing
format. Thus, Markdown’s formatting syntax only addresses issues that
can be conveyed in plain text.

For any markup that is not covered by Markdown’s syntax, you simply
use HTML itself. There’s no need to preface it or delimit it to
indicate that you’re switching from Markdown to HTML; you just use
the tags.

The only restrictions are that block-level HTML elements – e.g. <div>,
<table>, <pre>, <p>, etc. – must be separated from surrounding
content by blank lines, and the start and end tags of the block should
not be indented with tabs or spaces. Markdown is smart enough not
to add extra (unwanted) <p> tags around HTML block-level tags.

Tags:
Design
Markdown