What is markdown?

hi everyone my name is Carlos I'm a web developer based in Boca New York and today I want to talk about mark down what is markdown why do we use it and how does it actually work so let's go ahead and jump right in so what exactly is marked down why do we use it and how do we use it well in simple terms from markdown is a text to HTML conversion tool for web writers so markdown allows us to read using it easier to read easier to write plain text format and then convert it

structurally to valid HTML with this definition markdown is essentially two things one it's a plain text formatting syntax and two it's a software tool that was written in Perl that converts plain text formatting to HTML the overall design goal for markdowns formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible so that allows us to create text that looks like this and transform it into this kind of output now many of us have used different tools that allows us to format text in various different ways so Microsoft Word is a great example for that let's

look at how I would write some simple content using Microsoft Word now Microsoft Word is very useful in providing us with various tools to actually format and edit our text but a lot of times it may be overdoing it perhaps you just want to bold some text or make a simple list and maybe you don't even want to open Microsoft Word to format a text that you're gonna send as an email another tool that's used a lot and it's the way web pages and email templates are coded so that text is formatted is HTML so

let's see how we would write the same content using HTML now hTML is pretty much used everywhere in the Internet it's also more expressive and can actually achieve some specific effects that may be difficult or impossible in markdown however there's a learning curve to HTML and similarly to Microsoft Word its benefits really depend on what you're using it for you can see in this example you have to actually keep into account and various different tacks that HTML provides and we make sure that they're all being closed properly now this might be easy if you're experienced

but if you're a beginner and you just want to format a text like an email or certain documentation it might be overboard and unnecessary to learn so let's see how we would write the content from the previous examples using markdown as you can see markdown syntax is comprised entirely of punctuation characters which have been chosen carefully to look like what they mean so asterisk around the word kind of represent emphasis which pulls the text markdown lists look like well lists now markdown is not a replacement for HTML or even close to it it syntax is

very small and it only corresponds to a very small subset of HTML tags but the idea is not to create a syntax that makes it easier to insert HTML tags the idea for markdown is to make it easy to read write and edit pros due to this markdowns formatting syntax only addresses issues that can be conveyed in a plain text so let's take a look at how we actually use markdown to format and edit our text for headings we usually use a hash tag to represent what kind of heading we're going to be using to

create a heading we usually add a hash in front of a word or phrase and the number of hashes you use should correspond to the heading level so if we want to create a heading level 3 we use 3 hashes for different types of emphasis will use other punctuation marks if you want to italicize your text you simply add an asterisk before and after the word in order to bold in it you add two asterisks before and after the word and if you want to have some strikethrough text you simply wrap the text until this

for list honors we also have quite simple syntax we can use to create an unordered list you're given the option of using dashes asterisk or plus signs to put them in front of line items and this will create a bulleted list for ordered lists all we need to do is simply add line items with numbers followed by periods now the numbers don't have to be in numerical order but the list should start with a number one and dessert create a numbered list so now that we have an idea of how markdown is composed listing in

the little deeper in figure out how exactly it works now Mark done is basically plain text so it can be used pretty much anywhere but in this case let's assume you wrote a file that has some markdown syntax from there you're gonna make sure that you save it with an extension called markdown or dot MD going from there once you have your markdown file from there you actually need a markdown application that's capable of processing the don't file now markdown applications use something called a markdown processor also commonly referred to as a parser or an

implementation that basically take the markdown formatted text and now put it to HTML format now at that point your document can be viewed in a web browser or combined with a stylesheet and print it and if you simply want to just experiment with markdown there's a bunch of markdown editors online that you can simply look up and use markdown with so why should we use Martin well there are a few reasons for that one of them is accessibility markdown is very accessible to someone who doesn't know the first thing about HTML so let's look at

an example where HTML can get quite nested and complex as you can see here there's a lot of boilerplate that we actually have to create before we even start writing the content of our text using HTML moreover if we have a lot of content it can get quite nested and can be very hard to read especially if you're not really familiar with HTML this leaves us with a lot of room for error HTML basically begs for typos so even the smallest typo or mistake can completely alter and change the way our content looks one of

the other reasons we should use markdown is that due to the way it's written we can pretty much use it everywhere for example is used widely and software documentation particularly open source because it enables rich or formatting than plain text alone certain applications also support markdown so you can even format your text us markdown within the application itself Martin has become so popular in common that even applications that you probably are familiar with use markdown themselves it's become the default or the standard for for many certain types of text so let's look in a few

more examples as to where exactly markdown is applicable for starters we can use it on websites markdown was assigned for the web so it should come as no surprise that there are plenty of applications specifically designed for creating website content now although there are limitations for markdown if you're intending to write something with straightforward text like a blog then markdown might save you some time now while markdown doesn't have all the bells and whistles of word processors like Microsoft Word it's very useful to creating documents and know and it's still very readable that you can

actually copy and paste it elsewhere and still be able to format it as markdown now if you send a lot of emails and you're tired of the formatting controls available on most email provider websites you'll be happy to know that there's a bunch of tools online that allow you to actually implement markdown inside your email making it very easy and readable to send my emails with formatted text lastly markdown is a natural fit for technical documentation companies like github are increasingly switching to markdown for their documentation due to its ease of writing and reading the

actual documents so hopefully this video gave you a better understanding of what is markdown and how it's actually used anyway thank you all for watching join the conversation by subscribing to this channel or dropping a comment below and if you want to take your skills to the next level start learning on code Academy today