Plenty of tools assist with HTML writing by highlighting errors on the fly, but why rely on those? Markdown’s simplicity and flexibility helps you make fewer mistakes, and errors are much easier to find. And especially if you’re in a hurry, the errors can be hard to spot. If you forget a slash or accidentally type an apostrophe instead of a quotation mark, your whole page could be screwed up. Even the smallest, one-letter tags require three characters to open them and four characters to close. For people not used to writing in hypertext, the Markdown characters are far more intuitive and easier to remember. There are no extra words or letters, the link looks like a footnote readers are used to seeing, and asterisks around a word convey emphasis even if you don’t know which is italics and which is bold.įor Web developers and designers, this clarity will make life easier for nontechnical members of your team. Not only is Markdown easier to type and read, it’s accessible to someone who doesn’t know the first thing about HTML. Markdown is just so dang legible, it will make your whole life easier. Why you should use Markdown to write your next blog post Here’s an example of the difference: HTML : Reading a Markdown document should make plain sense to anyone. For people unfamiliar with HTML, it could be impossible. “The idea is that 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.” The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible,” writes John Gruber of Daring Fireball, creator of Markdown. According to Gruber, Markdown syntax is designed to be readable and unobtrusive, so the text in Markdown files can be read even if it isn’t rendered. There are also several web-based applications specifically designed for writing in Markdown.ĭepending on the application you use, you may not be able to preview the formatted document in real time. Or you can use one of the many Markdown applications for macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android operating systems. You can add Markdown formatting elements to a plaintext file using a text editor application. The screenshot below shows a Markdown file displayed in the Atom text editor. It may take a while to get used to seeing Markdown syntax in your text, especially if you’re accustomed to WYSIWYG applications. Or to make a phrase bold, you add two asterisks before and after it (e.g., **this text is bold**). When you create a Markdown-formatted file, you add Markdown syntax to the text to indicate which words and phrases should look different.įor instance, to denote a heading, you add a number sign before it (e.g., # Heading One). In an application like Microsoft Word, you click buttons to format words and phrases, and the changes are visible immediately. Using Markdown is different than using a WYSIWYG editor. Created by John Gruber in 2004, Markdown is now one of the world’s most popular markup languages. Markdown is a lightweight markup language that you can use to add formatting elements to plaintext text documents. Even if you don’t have to convert to HTML at all, it’s still an appealing way to format plain text without having to deal with Microsoft Word or another goofy rich-text editor.īut if you write for the Web, or you work with people who do, you just have to try it. It’s amazingly useful just as a writing language. You don’t have to have Markdown installed on your site in order to use it. If there’s something you can’t do in Markdown, or if you can’t remember the Markdown syntax, you can switch back and forth freely between HTML and Markdown within one document. One of its key strengths is that you can use HTML in Markdown. Thus, ‘Markdown’ is two things: (1) a plain-text formatting syntax and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML.” … Once you are finished with your page, you can export the content to regular HTML/CSS code. MarkdownPad is a web editor for writers that enables you to create text based web content, formatted in HTML/CSS without the need to use any HTML tags.
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