We propose a standard, unambiguous syntax specification for Markdown, along with a suite of comprehensive tests to validate Markdown implementations against this specification. The only way to resolve Markdown ambiguities and inconsistencies is Babelmark, which compares the output of 20+ implementations of Markdown against each other to see if a consensus emerges. There’s no standard test suite for Markdown MDTest is the closest thing we have. To make matters worse, because nothing in Markdown counts as a “syntax error,” the divergence often isn’t discovered right away. As a result, users are often surprised to find that a document that renders one way on one system (say, a GitHub wiki) renders differently on another (say, converting to docbook using Pandoc). was last updated December 17 th, 2004.īecause there is no unambiguous spec, implementations have diverged considerably over the last 10 years. But was quite buggy, and gave manifestly bad results in many cases, so it was not a satisfactory replacement for a spec. In the absence of a spec, early implementers consulted the original code to resolve these ambiguities.

John Gruber’s canonical description of Markdown’s syntax does not specify the syntax unambiguously. By 2014 there were dozens of implementations in many languages.

Gruber wrote the first markdown-to-html converter in Perl, and it soon became widely used in websites. It was developed in 2004 by John Gruber in collaboration with Aaron Swartz. Learn Markdown in 60 Seconds Who created Markdown? It’s a plain text format for writing structured documents, based on formatting conventions from email and usenet. CommonMark A strongly defined, highly compatible specification of Markdown What is Markdown?

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