Markdown is a lightweight markup language. Or is it?
I use Markdown everyday. All my notes are in Markdown, I write the first drafts of my papers in Markdown (then converting them to LaTeX), and, thanks to Michael Fortrin’s plugin, I am blogging in Markdown. Part of its utility is its transparency. It gets out of your way and let’s you focus on content.
Ironically, it is this very virtue that prevents it from being a markup language properly so called. In an insightful exchange on the Markdown mailing list, Allan Odgaard, the developer of TextMate, writes:
I also wonder if JG views Markdown as a markup language seeing how a lot of constructs are not exactly based on explicit markup.
John Gruber, the developer of Markdown, confirms Allan’s suspicion:
Funny, but true. I don’t really have a strong opinion about what “markup language” means, but when I was trying to decide what to call it, I thought to myself, “Well, it’s not a markup language, because the most important rules are implicit, so what would be the opposite of ‘markup’?…
Markdown, of course. Revealingly, on the Markdown website, John doesn’t describe Markdown as a markup language but as a ‘plain text formatting system’.
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