Markdown is a lightweight plain-text markup language that uses simple punctuation conventions to denote formatting such as headings, lists, links, and emphasis. Created by John Gruber in 2004 and later standardised by efforts like CommonMark, it is designed to be readable as source and convertible to HTML and other formats. Its simplicity makes it the dominant format for documentation, notes, and content authoring in developer tooling.
Content
- Variants such as CommonMark, GitHub Flavored Markdown, and MyST extend the core with tables, task lists, footnotes, and embedded code. Its plain-text nature makes it version-control friendly and easy for both humans and language models to author and parse.