Markdown: What’s in the name?

Markdown: What’s in the name?

I’m giving a workshop on quarto - hence putting sometime into parsing the excellent quarto documentation - It’s of superb quality. It’s based on using a variant of markdown as a central part of the workflow. I’ve never thought deeply about why markdown is called that.

Then I came across this gem in the quarto docs:

A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. – John Gruber

I’ve always thought of markdown as a way to write text that can be easily converted to HTML. But this is a nice way to think about it.

Wonderful!