[$] A common Markdown

The Markdown text-markup format was created in 2004 by John Gruber, and has been widely adopted—especially in applications where some sort of text formatting is desirable, but full HTML is, for some reason, considered overkill. Despite its wide adoption, though, there have long been differing interpretations of various ambiguities in the canonical description of the format, leading to incompatible implementations. Now a small team of Markdown enthusiasts has decided to publish a more formal specification that can be used as a strict guidebook for implementers concerned about valid formatting.