Why Does Github Use Markdown?

Markdown's not really a language in the same sense that python is a language. It's just a way to take plain text and make it so you can add code formatted correctly.. and italics, headers, links without as much effort as coding it in html directly or something like that..

For instance at the bottom of this text answer field is a link to Markdown Cheatsheet.. and you can add all kind of fun stuff with Markdown into this text editor. Which is what allows me to do this:

<h1>Add code</h1>
  <p> all kind of other stuff too.</p>
  <p>GitHub uses it on the read.me files</p>
  <p>so that instead of plain text it can look formatted and nice and include applicable code snippets</p>

a couple of *'s around a word and it is then bold

a single* and it's italics

from What is markdown?

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).

It's an easy way to format text for web browsers without having to use HTML tags.

Markdown is one of the more popular markup languages.

// grumpy old man mode on Yes, since everyone using these web technologies already knows HTML, let's create yet ANOTHER language to do the exact same thing. Because, of course, less characters equals more easy... even over something that you already know... right?