Markdown is a text-to-HTML filter; it translates an easy-to-read / easy-to-write structured text format into HTML. Markdown's text format is most similar to that of plain text email, and supports features such as headers, *emphasis*, code blocks, blockquotes, and links.

Markdown's syntax is designed not as a generic markup language, but specifically to serve as a front-end to (X)HTML. You can use span-level HTML tags anywhere in a Markdown document, and you can use block level HTML tags (like <div> and <table> as well).