Format de fichier

À propos des fichiers MD

MD (Markdown · Format de document)

Lancement 2004 Par John Gruber & Aaron Swartz

Markdown (.md) est un format de fichier pris en charge par KaijuConverter pour l’archivage, l’échange professionnel et la conversion multiplateforme.

Famille

Documents & Text

Extension

.md

Type MIME

text/markdown

Utilisable comme

Entrée Sortie

L'histoire

COMMENT MD
A VU LE JOUR.

2004

2014

2017

Markdown was born in 2004 out of a collaboration between John Gruber (writer of the Daring Fireball blog) and Aaron Swartz (co-founder of Reddit, RSS 1.0 author). Gruber wanted a way to write formatted text for the web that looked readable as plain text — you shouldn’t have to learn HTML just to italicize a word in a blog post. The solution: a tiny set of conventions (asterisks for emphasis, pound signs for headings, angle-brackets for links) that compile to HTML.

For a decade Markdown drifted without a formal spec — every implementation disagreed about edge cases. CommonMark (2014), and later GitHub Flavored Markdown (2017, finalized as GFM), standardized the core. Today Markdown is the default writing format for GitHub READMEs, Stack Overflow posts, Slack messages, Discord, Reddit comments, Jupyter notebooks, static-site generators, and most developer documentation on Earth.

CURIOSITÉS ET
ANECDOTES.

The original 2004 Markdown implementation is a single 1 500-line Perl script Gruber still hosts on daringfireball.net.

Aaron Swartz contributed significantly to the language design, including the link reference syntax — before his death in 2013.

Markdown has no official 2.0 — Gruber declined to update it, which is why CommonMark, GFM, and MultiMarkdown forked independently.

GitHub renders ~500 million Markdown files per week, making its Markdown parser one of the most exercised codebases on the internet.

Jupyter notebooks, static-site generators, and academic publishing platforms (Pandoc, Hugo, Astro, MkDocs) all descend from Gruber's original conventions.

POINTS FORTS ET
LIMITES.

Points forts

Readable as plain text even before rendering — fits in version control beautifully.
Dead-simple: 90% of needs covered in 10 minutes of learning.
Converts trivially to HTML, PDF, EPUB, and DOCX via Pandoc.
Every modern IDE, note-taking app, and developer tool renders it natively.
Lightweight — a typical Markdown file is kilobytes, not megabytes.

Limites

No formal authoritative spec — CommonMark, GFM, and MultiMarkdown differ on edge cases.
Tables and complex layouts are clunky; footnotes and math require extensions.
Links to images stay external — no embedded media unless you base64-inline.
Styling is limited to what HTML allows — custom branding requires CSS outside Markdown.

Tailles et poids typiques

README

1-15 KB

Blog post

2-30 KB

Full technical manual

50 KB - 2 MB

Spécifications techniques

MIME type: text/markdown
Extensions: .md, .markdown, .mdown, .mkd
Standard: CommonMark, GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM)
Encoding: UTF-8 (conventional)
Companion spec: RFC 7763 (2016)

CONVERTIR DEPUIS
MD

md pdf md docx md odt md txt md html md epub md rst md adoc md org md textile md mediawiki md man md opml md t2t md dokuwiki md jira md creole md muse md ipynb

CONVERTIR EN
MD

docx md html md rst md txt md odt md tex md epub md htm md xhtml md adoc md org md textile md mediawiki md man md opml md typst md t2t md dokuwiki md jira md creole md muse md pdf md doc md rtf md xml md djvu md pages md srt md vtt md ass md ssa md ps md sub md json md yaml md toml md mobi md azw3 md fb2 md lit md cbz md cbr md htmlz md txtz md pdb md lrf md snb md ipynb md hwp md

Cas d'usage courants

Technical documentation, README files, blog posts, note-taking.