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What is Markdown? Markdown is a plain text syntax for writing text documents that can be transformed to HTML. Markdown uses punctuation characters to indicate HTML elements. That punctuation then gets converted to HTML tags during a transformation or export process.

Markdown dates back to 2004, when John Gruber published the original Markdown syntax guide. Gruber, along with Aaron Swartz, created Markdown with two goals:

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to make Markdown as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is feasible.; and to support inline HTML within Markdown-formatted text. Text-to-HTML filters such as Textile define a syntax that replaces a wide range of HTML elements. Other filters, such as reStructuredText, do not support inline HTML tags.

Markdown, by contrast, only defines a syntax for a small subset of HTML elements. For other elements, you use the corresponding HTML tag. In other words, Markdown makes it possible to write documents without knowing HTML, but HTML is available if you need it. A Markdown document might look like the example that follows.