What is Markdown?

- [Male Narrator] Markdown is a markup language. It's an extremely simple markup language, which is what has made it incredibly popular on the Web and in other applications. Markdown is used to format text on GitHub, Reddit, Stack Exchange, Trello, and in R Markdown we use it to format the text in our reports and presentations. Markup languages allow authors to annotate content. And that content could be anything from reports to websites. HTML is the most widely used markup language, and allows me to demonstrate markup effectively. In HTML, content is annotated with tags. For instance, we use the A tag to annotate the text, "Click Here" as a link. Web browsers parse this markup to display the content as a link. And that's probably going to be blue, on most websites. To understand why markdown is so simple and ubiquitous, we need to understand its origins. Markdown was created by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz in 2004, so that John would have a way of quickly marking up blog posts without having to write HTML himself. Markdown was designed so that a human reader could easily parse the content. Let's see an example. Here's a markdown document with the following content. A heading and a sub-heading. There's also an embedded image and some formatted text. Markdown is therefore perfect for writing blog posts, but it's also perfect for pretty much any copy you might want to publish to the Web. It's important to note that Markdown comes in many different flavors. The base ingredients we've just seen are used everywhere. They're usually slight differences between different flavors of Markdown, when formatting code. Some Markdown flavors also support tables, grids, and other fancy features. It very much depends on what flavor Markdown you're using, and in what application.