Most people are quite aware of HTML. Which can be abbreviated as Hyper Text Markup Language trust me it’s quite important to know the full form. So here our main focus is on what Markup and Markdown language is?
Markup and markdown languages are two distinct types of languages used to format and structure text, typically for display on web pages or in documents.
Markup Language
A Markup language is not a programming language but it is a language that can be used to structure, format and define relationships between the components of text with help of tags and symbols they are used to make more readable documents. Most popular markup languages are HTML,XML,SGML.
Markup language are mostly used to make web pages only static one’s though. But markup languages are mostly useless when it comes to adding functionality and cannot be used to create dynamic websites.
Well I mostly skipped the history and the other features but let’s know about it’s counterpart the Markdown language.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Example Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is a Heading</h1>
<p>This is a paragraph of text.</p>
<a href="https://www.example.com">Visit Example.com</a>
</body>
</html>
Markdown Language
Are you familiar with something called a readme file. If you are familiar and have worked with it Yes you are using a markdown language.
Mark down language is not different Markup it’s just a light weight version of it. Well Markup may get complex sometimes for few things like you just want write few sentences about you and have 0 knowledge about tags and the syntax. You just use a text editor and write whatever you like.
It’s just Invented to make the work easy. This platform is using it’s own version of Markdown like I just changed the font to italic.
Why do we need it in the first place we use markdown Without knowing it is markdown we prepare our resumes through LaTeX, Create readme files and you use to add bullets, URL’s and Titles for the presentations you create.
After all this you realize the .md extension of readme file means Markdown and boom you can find it even in the documentation.
In the end Markdown is preferred for readability and Markup is preferred for Expressiveness and it can achieve more things that are not possible with Markdown.
# This is a Heading
This is a paragraph of text.
[Visit Example.com](https://www.example.com)