Vim, Notepad++ and Sublime editors also have plugins to support Markdown syntax highlighting and previewing. Even GitHub's Read Me file uses this format. Wordpress and other Blog Engines have plugins to support the format. The most popular amongst the adopters of the format is. As Markdown has gained popularity, it has enjoyed very fast industry wide acceptance. The standard file extension of a markdown file is *.md. There are a number of markdown flavors but we are not going to discuss them here as they still need to be standardized. The concept is similar to Rich Text Format (RTF) but this is not properietry.

So, we can write some text in a Markdown style and transform it to the format of our choice. As the world is getting older, we have more and more need to support cross platform applications as developers. You can develop a parser to render the input text to your required format. For Markdown, we describe how data should be presented, but this is not specific to any target engine. The idea of Markdown is considered an opposite of Markups. So it is browser specific and cannot be used outside its context. HTML describes formatting of documents displayed in a browser.

Since we have different data display requirements in various scenarios, there are many markup languages developed to handle them. These languages describe how some data should be formatted and displayed. Generally, the presentational aspect of markup are considered and used. It can also set some piece of text aside from such treatment. These annotations can be used for presentation and processing of the text. So it is to provide extra information with the text in order to further define it. If you look at Wikipedia, Markup languages are defined as follows: A (document) markup language is a modern system for annotating a document in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from the text. Historically, the word came from book publishing. They are generally considered as languages which have TAGS. From HTML to XML, we have seen a lot of markup languages.

Notepad++ markdown view