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<PRONOM-Report xmlns="http://pronom.nationalarchives.gov.uk">
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      <FormatID>1959</FormatID>
      <FormatName>Markdown</FormatName>
      <FormatVersion>
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      <FormatAliases>
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      <FormatFamilies>
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      <FormatTypes>Text (Mark-up)</FormatTypes>
      <FormatDisclosure>
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      <FormatDescription>Markdown was created by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz circa 2004. The purpose of Markdown is to let users write clean text-based documents that do not suffer from the legibility issues of other 'markup' formats. 

Markdown uses combinations of characters, for example, hashes (pound-sign), asterisks, and combination of square- and rounded- brackets to prefix or suffix parts of text. The symbols provide instructions to an interpreter. A single hash '#' for example, that prefixes a line of text is an instruction to make that line a top-level header in a formatted document. Two hashes '##' is an instruction to render, or output, a secondary header. And so on.

Ultimately the result of writing markdown is a document that can be parsed into a well-formed version of other presentation languages such as HTML or XHTML.

There is no single specification for Markdown, nor is there a single canonical output. That is, Markdown syntax could be converted into many other file types. 

Further descriptions of the background of Markdown and a list of Markdown 'flavors' can be found on the Archiveteam Just Solve It File Formats Wiki: http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/Markdown

Wikipedia also provides a thorough description of Markdown and its syntax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown#Standardization</FormatDescription>
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      <ReleaseDate>
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      <WithdrawnDate>
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      <ProvenanceSourceID>195</ProvenanceSourceID>
      <ProvenanceName>Artefactual Systems Inc / Artefactual Systems Inc</ProvenanceName>
      <ProvenanceSourceDate>23 Jul 2018</ProvenanceSourceDate>
      <ProvenanceDescription>Update to this entry was sent by Stadtarchiv Hof and included in v112 of signature file.</ProvenanceDescription>
      <LastUpdatedDate>20 Apr 2023</LastUpdatedDate>
      <FormatNote>RFC 7763 (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7763.html)

http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/Markdown

https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/</FormatNote>
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      <TechnicalEnvironment>
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      <FileFormatIdentifier>
        <Identifier>fmt/1149</Identifier>
        <IdentifierType>PUID</IdentifierType>
      </FileFormatIdentifier>
      <FileFormatIdentifier>
        <Identifier>text/markdown</Identifier>
        <IdentifierType>MIME</IdentifierType>
      </FileFormatIdentifier>
      <ExternalSignature>
        <ExternalSignatureID>2175</ExternalSignatureID>
        <Signature>md</Signature>
        <SignatureType>File extension</SignatureType>
      </ExternalSignature>
      <ExternalSignature>
        <ExternalSignatureID>3332</ExternalSignatureID>
        <Signature>markdown</Signature>
        <SignatureType>File extension</SignatureType>
      </ExternalSignature>
    </FileFormat>
    <SearchCriteria>Criteria</SearchCriteria>
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