Overview#
Purpose#
The goal of Markdown is to achieve "easy to read, easy to write."
Readability is, in any case, the most important. A document written in Markdown format should be able to be published directly as plain text and should not look like it is composed of many tags or formatting instructions. The Markdown syntax is influenced by several existing text-to-HTML formats, including Setext, atx, Textile, reStructuredText, Grutatext, and EtText, with the greatest inspiration actually coming from the format of plain text emails.
Compatibility with HTML#
The goal of Markdown syntax is to become a writing language suitable for the web.
Markdown does not aim to replace HTML, nor does it seek to be close to it; its syntax is minimal and corresponds only to a small subset of HTML tags. The idea behind Markdown is not to make HTML documents easier to write. In my opinion, HTML is already easy to write. The philosophy of Markdown is to make documents easier to read, write, and modify. HTML is a publishing format, while Markdown is a writing format. Thus, the formatting syntax of Markdown only covers what can be covered in plain text.
Tags that are not covered by Markdown can be written directly in the document using HTML. There is no need to annotate that this is HTML or Markdown; just add the tags directly.
The only restriction is on some HTML block elements—such as