

To allow people to format their text well for readability, Markdown is now used on several platforms such as So you have to make sure that, what you want to do, is implemented in your editor. It is also important to take note of the fact that there are some non-standard features that are available in some editors. MarkDown is turned into HTML by your editor and thus, depending on your editor, you might also be able to use inline HTML in your MarkDown document to do formatting which MarkDown cannot do. It is much simpler than HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) which is the standard for creating web pages. MarkDown is most suitable for online documentation. In 2004 Aaron Swartz and Joh Gruber worked together to create MarkDown with the aim of enabling people “write using easy-to-read and easy-to-write plain text format”. There was a need for some kind of markup that would be simpler than the markup used for web pages or for technical documentation such as in LaTeX. Most of our documentation is now meant for online reading.

We are moving away from using so much paper. WYSIWIG was much simpler and more intuitive for non-technical people to use. Markup was never completely replaced as it is still being used for web pages and online documentation but GUI environments became more popular and word processors took over which were WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). The tags had to be distinguishable from the manuscript text and would be interpreted by a separate program that would create an appropriately formatted document - mostly for printing. When computers came into play, markup was done by tags embedded in plain texts files. When this was done on paper the text would be marked up with a red or blue pen. In the days before computers had graphic user interfaces (GUIs), authors of documents had to find a way to indicate how they wanted their text formatted. Before explaining what MarkDown is we should just mention what “markup” is.
