Markdown
| Filename extensions | .md, .markdown |
|---|---|
| Internet media type | text/markdown |
| Uniform Type Identifier (UTI) | net.daringfireball.markdown |
| Developed by | |
| Initial release | March 9, 2004 |
| Latest release | 1.0.1 December 17, 2004 |
| Type of format | Open file format |
| Extended to | pandoc, MultiMarkdown, Markdown Extra, CommonMark, RMarkdown |
| Website | daringfireball |
Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber created Markdown in 2004 as an easy-to-read markup language. Markdown is widely used for blogging and instant messaging, and also used elsewhere in online forums, collaborative software, documentation pages, and readme files.
The initial description of Markdown contained ambiguities and raised unanswered questions, causing implementations to both intentionally and accidentally diverge from the original version. This was addressed in 2014 when long-standing Markdown contributors released CommonMark, an unambiguous specification and test suite for Markdown.