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[mcandre]

Describe what markdown is for, and how it's more of an idea that has been copied into numerous individual spin-offs, rather than one single standard.

I think of Markdown as a more intuitive version of MediaWiki syntax. Either way, the goal as I see it is to produce rich text documents in a syntax that's nearly as powerful as HTML but much easier to use.

I think we should also include a hyperlink to the historical "official" Markdown website, Daring Fireball. And if we're really productive, once the github markdown page is functional, try to get the Daring Fireball page to include a link at the top along the lines of Markdown has moved to ...

[jgm]

+++ Andrew Pennebaker [Oct 25 12 09:59 ]:

Describe what markdown is for, and how it's more of an idea that has
been copied into numerous individual spin-offs, rather than one single
standard.

I think of Markdown as a more intuitive version of MediaWiki syntax.
Either way, the goal as I see it is to produce rich text documents in a
syntax that's nearly as powerful as HTML but much easier to use.

That is one goal. The other goal, which is very important (and which
distinguishes markdown from e.g. textile) is readability as plain text:

The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make
it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted
document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking
like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While
Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML
filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax
is the format of plain text email.
http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/