Markdown means that your content is being created correctly.
In the past you may have heard of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) formatting. Think of Markdown like a simplified WYSIWYG.. simplified in the best way.
When designers and developers approach a project, they build styles into the project. Those styles dictate how basic elements, like headers and links, will appear. The styles are applied throughout the entire project.
In the past, a WYSIWYG editing tool had too much control. Someone could unknowingly add a new style to the design (like red italic bold headers) without meaning to. More often then not, it was a purposeful addition, but that leads to a race to the bottom, so style treatment became larger, bolder, and brighter. This makes designers sad :( because their carefully crafted theme is tossed by the wayside, like stuff.. old stuff.
Bottom line, people who edit content should focus on the words and the designer should make them pretty. Markdown does an excellent job at drawing a line in the sand, equipping us to all play nice together. The neat part is that when a designer pushes a new style to your website, it is consistently reflected across the whole chalupa, so they keep the design fresh and stay on top of browser caveats and features. (dropshadow anyone?)
Markdown is widely accepted by developers and editors, so it's the best choice for implementing best practice. Nearly every popular Content management solution supports Markdown, if not out-of-the-box, then with an easy-to-install extension.
http://mashable.com/2013/06/24/markdown-tools
Anyone who works with content should be using one of the following tools... Note: Everything about Markdown is free, paid stuff is totally optional and sometimes worse.
- Mou for Mac (it's free and it's best)
- ByWord for Mac ($9.99)
- MarkdownPad for Windows
- MarkPad for Windows
- Marked for Mac ($3.99). It provides a preview of your (Multi)Markdown as you work in any text editor.
- Or find another one and let us know about it.
- Stack Edit
- Hashify
- jbt editor Similar to Hashify.
- Dillinger
- Markable
- Calepin
- Prose
- Dingus, which is a quick online tool (that means it works in your browser) made by Gruber. There are many of these tools so if you want to work in a browser, find the one you like best.
- MarkPad
- If you want to turn a website into Markdown, then its easy to do with html2text (also see Marky)
- I really like using gist by github for sharing and collaborating (called forking) on documents. Here's a sample :P
####iOS Apps
##How do I write this Markdown stuff?
When developers talk about how to write something, they call it syntax.
To that end, here are related syntax documents sorted by ease of use.
- Wikipedia - History and formatting guide
- SquareSpace - Formatting guide
- Daring Fireball - The original guide by the author
- Lots more..
##Huh?
Markdown was made by John Gruber, and he says..
Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).
##I still don't understand
Markdown can be written in a basic text editor (don't use Word) like Notepad on Windows. Mac's don't have a basic built-in text editor, but that's what the tools I mentioned above are for. You can write or copy and paste, but it's an easy way to write text that can quickly be turned into HTML. The web is written in HTML, so think of it like quick-start web developing for content editors. When you write in Markdown, you save the document with the file extension .md. More often than not, you'll never need to save a Markdown document, because you'll be using online tools.
##Around the web
- StackOverflow.com uses Markdow for posts and comments. Here's their help guide.
- github.com uses a custom blend "GitHub Flavored Markdown" for their discussions. Here's their help guide.
##Oh yah..
- I really want Markdown extra to be more prevalant. It is the future of Markdown. If you can develop using Markdown Extra, please do. If possible, upgrade your Markdown installs to Markdown Extra.
- Textile is great, and was probably used most by 37 Signals, but it lost the battle in the end.
It did have out-of-the-box support for tables tho, which was quite nice.
Textile is a lightweight markup language originally developed by Dean Allen and billed as a "humane web text generator". Textile converts its marked-up text input to valid, well-formed XHTML and also inserts character entity references for apostrophes, opening and closing single and double quotation marks, ellipses and em dashes
- [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_markup_language) - History and formatting guide
- [Textism](http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/) - Dingus for Textile
- [Hobix](http://redcloth.org/hobix.com/textile/) - Formatting guide
##Take action! Demand that your content projects be built with Markdown.