Wednesday, April 5, 2017

What is Markdown Syntax?

HTML markup is well known and Markdown markup is a construct to make a web page readable.  Markdown syntax is used to make it possible to write to the web using simple text.  It is a text-to-HTML tool for web authors.

Markdown syntax is very small and not extensive like that of HTML. It is not used to replace HTML but to make it easy to read/write/edit prose in a web page. Markdown does not need special editors.

Since Markdown consists of few constructs if you need beyond them you can use HTML. One of the special constraints in using Markdown is in the case of block level elements such as 'table', 'pre', 'p' etc. In this case for using Markdown just surround block-level elements with blank lines and Markdown syntax takes care of the rest.

Learn more about Markdown syntax here. While you are there click on the tab Dingus tool (written in Perl) to convert your Markdown Syntax to html syntax.

For example you can create first and second level headers by just typing them as shown here:

A First Level Header
=====================

A Second Level Header
---------------------


The above Markdown text will be converted  into the HTML source by the Dingus tool: (note: Firefox browser does not render the 'pre' tags which are in the source of this page. That is why you are seeing the h1 and h2 tags rendered. Review my post on this browser problem.

A First Level Header

A Second Level Header

The Markdown text is readable and can be typed in with a text editor and the tool converts it to web compliant HTML.

Review the screen shot here:

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