Markdown is quickly becoming one of the preferred markup languages for authoring technical content. Markdown’s simple authoring, widespread use in the developer community, and support for collaboration between authors and SMEs makes it appealing to content creators.
As its popularity grows, so does the demand to enable some enhanced authoring. However, there’s a fine line between extending Markdown for enhanced authoring capabilities and ruining the simple nature of Markdown that authors and collaborators enjoy.
We also know that most modern doc applications need HTML5 output to meet design requirements for creating the best user experience. With marked-it, IBM built a generator to parse Markdown to HTML5 and process extensions the team created to provide some of those advanced authoring capabilities but without complicating the Markdown markup too much.
Trying to preserve the simplicity of Markdown, the extensions are a way to hook into well-defined points in the HTML generation process. This way, you can define ways to add classes to elements, new Markdown markup, or even how to organize a group of topics. In this article, I introduce you to some key elements in marked-it that make it a useful tool for displaying HTML5-generated content from Markdown source on a website.
