Spec Markdown is first and foremost Markdown. As such, it follows Markdown’s philosophy of intending to be as easy to read and easy to write as is feasible.

In order to interoperate with other tools which use Markdown, Spec Markdown tries to add as little additional syntax as possible, instead preferring conventions. This means any documents written with Spec Markdown in mind should render adequately by other Markdown renderers.

To support the rendering additions of Spec Markdown, some features of Markdown may be limited or removed. As an example, Spec Markdown is strict about the order and locations of headers in a document.