Markdown is a data exchange standard.
The Markdown documentation is managed by The Daring Fireball Company LLC, and was last updated in 2025.
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.
See: Wikipedia: Markdown
### Third level heading
And here's a paragraph of text, followed by a list:
- First item
- Second item
- Third item
Strengths
- Separates content and how it's presented
- Easy to use
- Widely used
Limitations
- A number of different implementations (known as flavours), with some slight incompatibilities between them
- Only supports basic formatting
- No semantic structure (eg. asides, articles, sections) other than headings