What is Markdown?

If you’re already familiar with Markdown, feel free to skip ahead.

Markdown is a minimalistic language for writing HTML content very quickly. It gives us the ability to write text-based documents that are legible and small, while compiling into vaid HTML. It makes drafting, updating, and publishing very easy, and is a common tool used among programmers in all lines of work.

A Markdown compiler’s job is to convert “markdown” content into valid HTML.

For example, I could have the following article written in Markdown:

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# This is a title

This is a paragraph of text. How neat! In this tutorial, we will learn how to 
turn this into a paragraph block by putting `<p>` tags around it. 

And a markdown compiler will convert it into the following HTML:

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<h1>This is a title</h1>
<p>This is a paragraph of text. How neat! In this tutorial, we will learn how to 
turn this into a paragraph block by putting <code><p></code> tags around it.</p>

The compiler we are building in this course will convert heading tags, paragraph blocks, and code snippets from Markdown into valid HTML.