Live collaboration on Desktop text editors ![]() These tools add collaborative editing and versioning features: However, a lot of the docs we create require feedback and edits from multiple members of our team. The tools mentioned in the previous section provide great, distraction-free, writing experiences. You can write and read Markdown in any text editor, including the one that came pre-installed on your laptop.įor a more pleasant editing experience, here are some examples of popular desktop editors Notice the difference in readability? The free online Markdown Guide has a more comprehensive tour of Markdown’s basic and extended syntaxes. Notice how, in Markdown, there's no annotation, but in HTML it is wrapped in opening and closing tags. Notice how, in Markdown, there's no annotation, but in HTML it is wrapped in opening and closing `` tags.įor comparison, here’s the same text in HTML: Here’s what Markdown looks like in the raw: In fact, some content management systems (e.g., Ghost, Grav, Pico and Hugo) rely on Markdown documents to generate static websites that are simple to implement and blazingly fast. And because Markdown compiles to semantic HTML, without any inline styling, the content is portable to different content management systems. In addition to being a syntax, Markdown is also software (originally written in Perl) that converts Markdown-annotated plain text to HTML. That’s why Markdown is often described as a “lightweight” markup language. Instead of tags and attributes, Markdown has less obtrusive special characters for annotating plain text. Those special characters for formatting text in posts on Slack, GitHub and StackOverflow? That syntax is Markdown (or at least Markdown-inspired).įirst, Markdown is a plain text formatting syntax that supports a subset of the semantic elements in the HTML standard, including headers, paragraphs, lists and links. However, an even older technology, Markdown, has proven to be a reliable alternative approach to writing for the web.Įven if you’ve never heard of Markdown, you’ve probably encountered it. They often look nice on the surface, but online RTEs have a bad reputation for mangling content and providing subpar user experiences.Ī promising new class of online RTEs (e.g., Quill, Trix, CKEditor and Editor.js) have come along in the past five years. Rich text editors (RTEs), like the one built into your content management system, hide HTML behind a “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” ( WYSIWYG) text editing area with point-and-click formatting options. But for most of us, all those tags and attributes are just distracting cruft. Web page authors use its extensive syntax to encode structural semantics into their content so web browsers render it properly. HTML is a markup language designed for annotating content, not writing it. What is MarkdownĪll web copy is published in HTML, but practically no one writes or edits web copy in HTML. For example, if you were interested in publishing your Markdown-based content on Apple News, check out these docs. Copy can be written and edited once and then disseminated through multiple websites, mobile apps, etc. Markdown is useful for journalists (and anyone who writes for the web) because it’s a reliable, open-source technology with a non-proprietary format. ![]() If you produce journalism for the web, Markdown was made for you
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