Simple. Readable. Writeable.

Markdown is the purest abstraction of HTML that there is. It’s a straightforward language with it’s own syntax that’s easy to pickup and use.

Markdown was invented in 2004 by John Gruber, author of Daring Fireball, for the express purpose of writing for the web. It was picked up by the GitHub community and rose to prominence as the preferred solution for producing documentation.

Basically, if you need to write about software, on the web, you should use Markdown.

It requires a processor to output HTML, but it’s strength is it’s ability to create complex structures with little effort.

• Check out the spec on Daring Fireball

• Here’s an easy to approach Markdown cheatsheet from adam-p

• And for further reading here’s the article on GitHub’s enhanced version of the language, aptly named GitHub Flavored Markdown