Intro to Markdown
One of the really nice things about GitHub is that you can use Markdown to format text on a web page without the use (or knowledge!) of HTML coding. This makes it really easy to create content. In this section, you’ll learn a bit more about Markdown and how to use it to create formatted text.
What is Markdown?
Borrowed shamelessly from GitHub’s Mastering Markdown page:
Markdown is a way to style text on the web. You control the display of the document; formatting words as bold or italic, adding images, and creating lists are just a few of the things we can do with Markdown. Mostly, Markdown is just regular text with a few non-alphabetic characters thrown in, like # or *. Markdown uses simple notation to apply simple formatting rules. Since it’s pretty much just plain text, it’s transferrable and much simpler than marked-up text like HTML or even Word or Google documents. It’s also very readable in its plain text format, which is nice. For much of the writing that you do for the web, Markdown is good enough. GitHub uses Markdown for its documents (this document was created in markdown), as does a variety of other web platforms (Reddit and Trello, as examples).