Markdown support coming to WordPress.com

Introduction

via blog.wordpress.com – WordPress announced yesterday on their blog that they are now supporting markdown for users of their WordPress.com hosted service. Markdown, a lightweight markup language created by John Gruber in 2004, compiles to HTML and is enjoyed by many publishers due to its ease of formatting and high readability. Publishing via markdown means users don’t need to take their fingers off their keyboard to quickly churn out properly formatted prose. This is in contrast to WordPress’s current workflow via the TinyMCE editor, which requires users to type their text, select which text needs to be formatted, then click a formatting button. I attempted to write in markdown for this blog for some time, trying out several plugins that promised backward compatibility, etc., but never found one that wasn’t without it’s fair share of bugs. Now that WordPress.com is offering this service, we should expect a Jetpack update with markdown-functionality that promises to be less prone to error. In my opinion, markdown support is a welcome departure from TinyMCE, a dated and cumbersome tool for formatting text. While I don’t see TinyMCE support going away completely (mainly due to clients wanting nothing more than “Word-style” editing features), I believe this is an important step forward for WordPress. sourcehttp://en.blog.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/markdown/