Hi -- when composing documents that are in a plain-text format, we occasionally want to use symbols to indicate formatting even when the document is likely to often be rendered as plain text. In this case, it can be useful to use a structured markup language that isn't as verbose or intrusive as HTML. One popular syntax is called Markdown, and it's used in a number of CMS systems and is widely supported by various programming tools. For example, it's used pretty much anywhere you can enter text in Github.
This syntax has some good benefits:
- It's easy to learn and to type.
- It's readable in plain text format, especially compared to HTML documents.
- Lots of tools will transform it to good looking HTML if it's being viewed on a web site.
- It's hard to be consistent when doing ad-hoc formatting in plain text documents, and this is a consistent syntax that works well.
This email is written in markdown syntax, and I put this note on a Gist so you can see how it'd be rendered online.