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Markdown may be defined as a standard

Posted by Scott_Ruecker on · 2 comments
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Markdown icon An effort is emerging to take the Markdown plain text formatting conventions originally developed by John Gruber in 2004 and create a standardisable specification. Markdown's syntax allows a minimal set of plain text 'markup' characters to offer useful basic formatting, for example, underlining text with "=" or "-" makes the text a heading as does preceding text with one to six "#" symbols. The apparent simplicity of the format has seen it used on many blogs, Reddit, GitHub and other sites as a way for users to present formatted text through the system. With this wide take up, developer Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Overflow, has called for a standardisation of Markdown.

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Comments (2)

It's pretty cool. I liked it. I remember that when I first played with it, one of my first thoughts was that it really ought to be a standard. I'm glad to see that it appears headed that way.
My Ode-power blog (http://stevenrosenberg.net/blog) uses Markdown, and I should look into getting it into my new WordPress install.

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Markdown: **bold**, *italic*, [text](https://link), - lists, > quotes, $x^2$ for math. Formatting help

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