Flavours of markdown

Calling variants ‘flavours’ makes it sound like you have a choice, as in picking an ice cream but, invariably, the flavour picks you. The app you choose as your text editor will determine what flavour you are using. Never worry which flavour that is if you have found something that suits the way you work.

There are far too many flavours, or variants, of markdown to mention here. So I will only mention four: the original spec, Multimarkdown, Commonmark and Github-flavoured markdown.

See here if you’re interested in finding out more, but note that many on the list are versions tailored to specific apps or platforms.

Markdown – the original

Markdown became a thing back in 2004, when John Gruber and Aaron Schwartz wrote the first specification.

Put simply, markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool originally designed for web writers. It allows you to write in an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid HTML if that is your intention.

So, with that said, markdown is two things:

1. a plain text formatting syntax; and
2. a software tool that converts the plain text formatting to HTML. See the syntax page on John Gruber’s site for details.

Several variants have been developed since to adapt markdown to different platforms. Often these variants are referred to as flavours. Some of the main variants are Commonmark and GitHub-flavoured markdown, or GFM.

These variants extend the original standard set for markdown.

Multimarkdown

Multimarkdown – mentioned here because it was one of the earliest variants – is an extension of markdown that adds a number of features to create more complex documents, such as academic papers and books. It was developed by Fletcher Penney.

The main features of Multimarkdown are its support for metadata, footnotes and references, and mathematical formulas and equations.

Commonmark

Commonmark is a markdown specification developed to address the lack of standardisation and consistency in existing markdown implementations. Its goal is to provide a unified and clear definition of the language, ensuring that content is interpreted consistently across different platforms and applications.

The main features of Commonmark are a detailed and standardised specification that defines how Markdown should behave in various situations, offering a a solid foundation for the development of additional extensions and variants and ensuring that content is displayed consistently across different implementations.

As a result, Commonmark allows the addition of extensions to cover additional functionalities without breaking the basic specification.

Commonmark is one of the specifications used in Obsidian.

GitHub-flavoured markdown, or GFM

GitHub-flavoured markdown is the variant that is used on GitHub to format README files, comments and other content. The main features of GFM, include the creation of tasks and checklists, tables and footnotes.

GFM is also used in Obsidian.

Obsidian

Obsidian supports Commonmark, Github-flavoured markdown and LaTeX, the latter being a typesetting system designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation.