Question

Reading about the GitHub wikis, I saw that they support several lightweight markup languages including MarkDown, but I am still a bit confused about the status and features of Markdown and the version GitHub uses.

Q1. In this link: Introduction to the GitHub flavored Markdown (GFM), GitHub says they use GFM, a special type of Markdown (MD) for messages, issues and comments. Do they also use GFM or regular MD on their Wikis?

Q2 Is the original Markdown still under development?

Q3 Does the original Markdown support programming-language specific syntax highlighting?

Answer 1

Do they also use GFM or regular MD on their Wikis?

Not the whole GitHub Flavored Markdown can be used in the wiki pages.

For instance, in the wiki, something like #123 won’t autolink to issue 123 from the current repository. However, in a Pull request or a inline comment, this works.

Is the original Markdown still under development?

Not that I know of. Lastest official release is dated December, 17 2004.

In order to fix some security issues, the code has been forked by the StackOverflow team and hosted at derobins/wmd. It’s now deprecated in favor of PageDown.
GitHub relies on Sundown, a native reimplementation of MarkDown based on the UpSkirt library by Natacha Porte.

Does the original Markdown support programming-language specific syntax highlighting?

No. This might even be considered as borderline against the philosophy of MarkDown.

The site indeed states “Markdown is intended to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is feasible. Readability, however, is emphasized above all else. 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.”

GitHub handles the syntax hightlighting through the use of Pygments.