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Tumblr’s Markdown Link is a Lie!

If you use Markdown to compose your Tumblr posts, you might be forgiven for thinking that the system uses Markdown too—the posting form links to the original syntax guide on Daring Fireball, after all.

It turns out that link is a bit of a fib. Tumblr actually uses PHP Markdown Extra, or something like it, which means you can write

This sentence needs a footnote[^1].

[^1]: This is the footnote it needs.

to get yourself a nicely-formatted footnote.1

You can also do abbreviations, definition lists, tables, and ID attributes for your headers without having to faff about with HTML2.

I have a horrible feeling that I’m the last person on Tumblr to figure this out, and I’m incandescent with rage faintly annoyed that Tumblr doesn’t make it clear which variant of Markdown it’s using.3

  1. Marco’s fondness for footnoting should’ve tipped me off. ↩

  2. Unless you want to use abbr tags without a title attribute, which I tend to with well-known abbreviations—like HTML—so I can be sure screen readers will pronounce them properly. ↩

  3. Mostly because I’m going to find it very hard to resist the temptation to edit past posts to conform to PHP Markdown Extra. ↩