The article written by Sarah Simpkin published in 2015, “Getting Started with Markdown” teaches all one needs to know about Markdown. The lesson contains why Markdown is used, how to format the files and how to preview Markdown formatted documents on the Web.

In 2004, John Gruber developed Markdown. Markdown refers to a way of formatting text files as well as a Perl utility to convert Markdown files into HTML. Basically, markdown is known as a plain text-based syntax for formatting documents. Utilizing plain text files is more advantageous over other documents as they are readable virtually on any and all device and they can withstand the test of time better than other file types-compatible. Markdown files can be saved with the extension .md and can be opened in a text editor such as TextEdit, Notepad, Sublime Text or Vim.

In Markdown, four levels of headings are available and are indicated by the number of hash tags preceding the heading text. For paragraphs, they must be separated by an empty line. In some implementations, single line breaks must also be indicated with two empty spaces at the end of each line. Emphasis can also be added in Markdown where texts can be italicized by wrapping the words in asterisk or underscore symbols. In addition, bold texts are written by wrapping the word in double asterisk or underscore. Markdown can also include support for ordered and unordered lists. Ordered lists are written by numbering each line. One must understand what the goal of Markdown as stated by Sarah Simpkin ∥2015∥ “which is to produce documents that are both legible as plain text and able to be transformed into other formats.” Markdown can also produce code snippets where representing code snippets from the rest of a document are a good practice that improves readability. “Typically, code is represented in monospaced type. Since Markdown does not distinguish between fonts, we represent code by wrapping snippets in back-tick characters like `. For example, `<.br />`. Whole blocks of code are written by typing three back-tick characters before and after each block. In the StackEdit preview window, this will render a shaded box with text in a monospaced font.” Sarah Simpkin ∥2015∥. Markdown also contains Blockquotes and Links. When a > is added before any paragraphs, they will be rendered as a blockquote element. While for Links, they can be written in two styles. Inline links are written by enclosing the link text in square brackets first then including the URL and optional alt-text in round brackets. To show images, one can use the exclamation mark followed by alt-text in square brackets, followed by the image URL and an optional title. They would not be shown in the plain text document but would be embedded into a rendered HTML page. Horizontal rules are produced when three or more hyphens, asterisks or underscores are included on a line by themselves regardless of the number of spaces between them. Lastly, Markdown does not include tables but other sites can be utilized to create tables and other special features.

All in all, though Markdown is becoming increasingly popular, particularly for styling documents that are viewable on the web, many people and publishers still expect the traditional file formats such as Word documents and PDFs. It is useful middle ground between unstyled plain text files and legacy word processor documents. Markdown contains simple syntax, is quick to learn, legible when rendered in other document types and will be usable and readable in the long term.