# Philosophy


Markdown is designed to be easy to write, and, even more importantly,
easy to read:

> A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain
> text, without looking like it's been marked up with tags or formatting
> instructions.\
> -- [John Gruber](https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#philosophy)

This principle has guided pandoc's decisions in finding syntax for
tables, footnotes, and other extensions.

There is, however, one respect in which pandoc's aims are different
from the original aims of Markdown.  Whereas Markdown was originally
designed with HTML generation in mind, pandoc is designed for multiple
output formats.  Thus, while pandoc allows the embedding of raw HTML,
it discourages it, and provides other, non-HTMLish ways of representing
important document elements like definition lists, tables, mathematics, and
footnotes.
