Introducing Markdown
====================

  By John Gruber  
  https://daringfireball.net/2004/03/introducing_markdown  
  Monday, 15 March 2004


I've written a text-to-HTML formatting tool called [Markdown] [md],
which is now available for download. Markdown allows web writers to
compose text using a simple, readable, plain text formatting syntax;
Markdown takes care of translating it to valid XHTML (or, if you
prefer, HTML).

So, yes, before another person asks, it is sort of like [Textile][].
Except that it's different.

Markdown works as a plug-in for Movable Type and Blosxom weblogs, and
also as a standalone Perl script (which means you can use it as a text
filter in BBEdit), and is licensed under the GPL.

If you're interested, you can download it and learn all the details
about its formatting syntax at the [Markdown project page] [md]. (Or
try it out for yourself using the [online demo app] [d].)

  [md]:      /projects/markdown/                "Markdown"
  [d]:		 /projects/markdown/dingus          "Markdown Dingus"
  [textile]: http://textism.com/tools/textile/  "Dean Allen's Textile"

If you're *not* interested, I'll try to change your mind in a bit.