The Markdown language was created in 2004 by John Gruber with the help of Aaron Swartz. This problem inspired John Gruber to develop Markdown, a new markup language which became widely successful and turned into one of the most popular markup languages there is. HTML uses tags which, however, make the content hard to read for humans. In the context of markup languages, you’ve most likely heard of the Hypertext Markup Language, better known as HTML, for displaying content in a web browser.
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It is simply a series of markups that are used alongside plain text. A markup language doesn’t really “do” anything in the sense of a programming language, it is not an executable script and doesn’t contain any programming logic. But beware: markup languages are not programming languages. At its core, a markup language is the same: a specific syntax that gets added to the plain text and allows a computer to “understand” the structure of the text while it is still (more or less) readable for humans. You might be familiar with markups from editors on authors’ manuscripts - in digital media such markups exist as well in order to specify what the parts of a document are rather than details on how they will get displayed. Markup languages are presentational languages that declare the structure and meaning of the content by adding syntax to the text. In this article, we demystify markup languages and Markdown and see that these plaintext-based approaches are in no way inferior to the widely used WYSIWYG processors for producing content.Įven if you’ve never encountered the above mentioned limitations: You might be surprised to find out that you can use Markdown in one of the most preferred messenger apps worldwide… What is a markup language?īefore diving into Markdown, let’s have a look at what a markup language is. While looking for tools to overcome the above restrictions, you might have heard of markup languages and, in particular, of Markdown which are based on platform-independent plain text. Wouldn’t it be great if you would need to produce your content only once on any device you have currently at hand and can convert it to any format you like later on? This limits the effective processing of your writings through other tools and devices and basically locks in your content. While these apps are undoubtedly useful, they come with their limitations: Quite often they work with proprietary data formats and support only a limited number of options to which you can convert your content. The predominant tools used for these scenarios follow the so-called What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) approach and most likely you have already worked with some of them such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Modern digital workflows often involve producing content for different purposes such as notes, emails, blog posts, or presentations.