text highlight in markdown

Question

Within a Markdown editor I want to support text highlight, not in the sense of code highlighting, but the type of highlighting people do on books.

In code oriented sites people can use backquotes for a grey background, normally inline code within a paragraph. However on books there is the marker pen for normal text within a paragraph. That is the classical black text on yellow background.

Is there any syntax within Markdown (or its variants) to specify that the user want that type of highlight? I want to preserve the backquotes syntax for code related marking, but also want a way to enable highlighted user text

My first thought is just using double backquotes, since triple backquotes are reserved for code blocks. I am just wondering if other implementations have already decided a syntax for it... I would also appreciate if someone could justify if this is a very bad idea.

Answer 1

As the markdown documentation states, it is fine to use HTML if you need a feature that is not part of Markdown.

HTML5 supports

<mark>Marked text</mark>

Else you can use span as suggested by Rad Lexus

<span style="background-color: #FFFF00">Marked text</span>

Answer 2

I'm late to the party but it seems like a couple of markdown platforms (Quilt & iA Writer) are using a double equal to show highlighting.

==highlight==