If you are familiar with formatting HTML pages and articles and sometimes have the feeling a general notepad editor just doesn’t meet your formatting needs, Markdown might be for you. Markdown is a markup language with plain text formatting syntax designed so that it can be converted to HTML and many other formats using a tool by the same name, it 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). The goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to be as readable as possible. A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. In short, you can create beautiful HTML documents without knowing any HTML because of the simplified syntax (I know. Little contradicting statement there, but just use it and you’re on you way to be an HTML master in no time). For example the Markdown syntax allows you to do thing like:
**Strong** → Strong
*Emphasis* → Emphasis
[Link to this article](http://www.mauricebakker.nl/all/markdown/) → Link to this article
Here is the full syntax reference provided and maintained by packetlife.net
For more information about the Markdown initiative see Daring Fireball
