# Markdown Goodies 📓
Hello friends!
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If you've ever read a GitHub page, you've used markdown. It's a simple, elegant syntax to apply formatting to text, and anyone can write it. Markdown was developed in 2004 by John Gruber in collaboration with Aaron Swartz as an easy to read and write text markup format. One of my side-project ideas this year involves markup, so I've been doing my due diligence on tools and techniques for parsing and displaying it. Here I'll share what I've found.
This issue is all about markdown 📓
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TLDR
Learn markdown to spice up your readme files and your Slack messages
Refer to this cheatsheet
Don't reinvent the wheel, and use an established markdown parser
The Spec
CommonMark defines a clear specification for how Markdown should work. And GitHub has evolved their own version, called GitHub Flavored Markdown or GFM.
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A Cheatsheet
Markdown is so simple, you can fit the entire syntax on one page. Devhints.io has a nice cheatsheet. Bookmark it.
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Parsers
If you're a programmer looking to integrate markdown into your project, you'll need to be able to parse the marked up text. To build a parser yourself that even comes close to covering the spec would require unfathomable skill with regular expressions and lots of wasted time. Luckily, there are parsers available in almost any language.Â
Perl (the original by John Gruber)
JavaScript (brought to you by CommonMark)
Ruby via kramdown
PHP via Parsedown
Python via Python-Markdown
Swift via Down (convert to multiple formats)
Java via flexmark-java
Who Uses Markdown?
All of these services use Markdown extensively. I find it's much cleaner to write in markdown than adding HTML rich text tags.
Keep making, and thanks for reading! 🙌
Hit reply to tell me what you're making. I'm looking for anyone interested in talking about their own side-projects and maker journey, so speak up if you'd like to appear in Serial Maker. I'd also love to know what you thought of this issue, and what you want to hear about in the future.
Until next week,
Craig
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