The text/markdown Media Type
RFC 7763
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) S. Leonard
Request for Comments: 7763 Penango, Inc.
Category: Informational March 2016
ISSN: 2070-1721
The text/markdown Media Type
Abstract
This document registers the text/markdown media type for use with
Markdown, a family of plain-text formatting syntaxes that optionally
can be converted to formal markup languages such as HTML.
Status of This Memo
This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
published for informational purposes.
This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has
received public review and has been approved for publication by the
Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Not all documents
approved by the IESG are a candidate for any level of Internet
Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 5741.
Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7763.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2016 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must
include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
described in the Simplified BSD License.
Leonard Informational [Page 1]
RFC 7763 The text/markdown Media Type March 2016
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1. This Is Markdown! Or: Markup and Its Discontents . . . . . 2
1.2. Markdown Is About Writing and Editing . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.3. Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2. Markdown Media Type Registration Application . . . . . . . . . 5
3. Fragment Identifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.1. Parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4. Content Disposition and preview-type . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
5. Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
6.1. Markdown Variants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
7. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
8. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
8.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
8.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
1. Introduction
1.1. This Is Markdown! Or: Markup and Its Discontents
In computer systems, textual data is stored and processed using a
continuum of techniques. On the one end is plain text: computer-
encoded text that consists only of a sequence of code points from a
given standard, with no other formatting or structural information
[UNICODE]. (On the other end is binary data, which computer systems
store and process with bit-for-bit accuracy.) Many of these standards
include control characters that are used as in-band signaling to
cause effects other than the addition of a symbol (or grapheme) to
the text.
Markup offers an alternative means to encode this signaling
information by overloading certain graphic characters (see, e.g.,
[ISO646]) with additional meanings. Therefore, markup languages
allow for annotating a document in a syntactically distinguishable
way from the text, while keeping the annotations printable. Markup
languages are (reasonably) well-specified and tend to follow (mostly)
standardized syntax rules. Examples of formal markup languages
include Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), HTML, XML, and
LaTeX. Standardized rules lead to interoperability between markup
processors, but they impose skill requirements on new users that lead
to markup languages becoming less accessible to beginners. These
rules also reify "validity": content that does not conform to the
rules is treated differently (i.e., is rejected) than content that
conforms.
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RFC 7763 The text/markdown Media Type March 2016
In contrast to formal markup languages, lightweight markup languages
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