Markdown
Family of lightweight markup languages
Markdown is a family of lightweight text‐based markup_languages which compile to HTML. It was based on the formatting conventions of (originally) plain‐text services such as email. Because Markdown is defined in terms of HTML, it is a popular choice for static site generators and other text input fields where HTML is the desired final product.
§ Flavours of Markdown
The original Markdown implementation and syntax definition on Daring Fireball was ambiguous and sometimes led to unexpected behaviour. As Markdown was re·implemented by others, it was often modified or extended to meet particular needs. There are countless different variants (or “flavours”) of Markdown, and consequently it is often important to check exactly which flavour is expected by the software you are using before you start authoring documents.
In an attempt to reduce the ambiguity that this situation has caused, in 2014 a group of people got together in an attempt to author a single “common” Markdown specification, one which would offer predictable behaviours for the base subset of Markdown features and enable (hopefully) unambiguous processing of Markdown files in places like code repositories. This formally specified variant of Markdown is known as CommonMark and should be the first choice of syntax for new Markdown documents.