Glossary

Key terms used throughout this book, listed alphabetically.

ATX heading A Markdown heading written with hash (#) characters. # Heading is an ATX heading. Named after Aaron Swartz's Atx format, which influenced the Markdown heading syntax.

Back matter The sections of a book that follow the main body: appendices, glossary, bibliography, index, colophon, and about-the-author pages.

Block element A Markdown element that occupies its own line or paragraph. Headings, paragraphs, lists, blockquotes, code blocks, and tables are all block elements. Contrast with inline elements.

CommonMark A strict, unambiguous specification of Markdown syntax published in 2014. CommonMark resolves many edge cases left undefined by the original Markdown specification and is the basis for GitHub Flavored Markdown and many other implementations.

Fenced code block A code block delimited by three or more backtick (`) or tilde (~) characters. Fenced code blocks can specify a language identifier for syntax highlighting. Contrast with indented code blocks.

Flavour A variant of Markdown that extends or modifies the original syntax. CommonMark, GitHub Flavored Markdown, and Pandoc Markdown are all flavours. Flavours vary in what extended syntax they support.

Frontmatter YAML metadata at the top of a Markdown file, delimited by --- lines. Frontmatter typically contains the title, date, tags, and other page-level metadata. Not to be confused with 'front matter' (two words), which refers to the introductory pages of a book.

GFM — GitHub Flavored Markdown The Markdown flavour used on GitHub. Based on CommonMark with extensions for tables, task lists, strikethrough, and fenced code blocks with syntax highlighting.

Inline element A Markdown element that appears within a paragraph or other block element. Bold, italic, links, inline code, and images are all inline elements. Contrast with block elements.

Markdown A lightweight plain-text formatting syntax created by John Gruber in 2004. Designed to be readable as-is and convertible to HTML. Now used across a wide range of tools and platforms with many extensions and variants.

Pandoc A universal document converter that reads and writes many formats, including Markdown, HTML, EPUB, and PDF. Used in the build pipeline for this book. Pandoc Markdown is a feature-rich Markdown flavour.

Plain text Text stored as character data with no formatting codes embedded. Markdown files are plain text — their formatting is encoded as punctuation characters, not as binary formatting data.

Raw block A block of content in a specific output format (such as HTML or Typst) embedded directly in a Markdown document. Pandoc passes raw blocks through to the matching output format and ignores them in all other formats.

Renderer Software that reads Markdown source and converts it to a visual or published format. A renderer may be a web application, a CLI tool (such as Pandoc), a desktop application, or a library embedded in another tool.

Shortcode A custom tag syntax used by some content management systems (such as Grav) to embed dynamic or styled content. Shortcodes are not standard Markdown and must be stripped or converted before the content can be processed by a standard Markdown renderer.

YAML 'YAML Ain't Markup Language.' A human-readable data serialisation format used for configuration files and Markdown frontmatter. Uses indentation and key-value pairs. Common in static site generators and publishing pipelines.