Markdown is really useful to know about. Not only because it is the markup language used by Obsidian, but also because it is actually used and supported by many other tools and platforms.
My goal here is not to teach you the Markdown syntax or get into the nitty-gritty details. Instead, my goal is to give you an idea about what Markdown is, why it’s useful to know about it, its pros and cons, and where you can go to learn more!
Markdown is a pure-text markup language created back in 2004 by John Gruber (Daring Fireball) and Aaron Swartz.
A markup language defines a set of rules to define, format, and render textual data. This might not make much sense to you if you’re not in IT, but that’s all right.
Markdown dictates how to represent certain things such as bold text, text in italics, headings, lists, quotes, emphasis, images, code, etc. Its syntax defines how text/content should look.
Here are a few examples (there’s more to know!). For each example, I start by showing you the Markdown syntax, and below it how the result looks when rendered by a capable editor (or when transformed into another format):
some text in bold
some text in bold
some text in italics
some text in italics
some text in bold and italics
some text in bold and italics
A quote
A quote
Some code: const foo = "bar";
const foo = "bar";
A list
A
B
C