getting strikethroughs when writing in markdown

This evening I was going on my merry way when I realized that I wanted to add some emphasis to my writing by adding a strikethrough mark.

Since I use Slack daily, I was under the mistaken impression that I would be able to wrap my words with ~, like so. Though this site is written in markdown, I’m sure you’ll have noticed that that was not striken.

So, what gives?

Well, it turns out that there is no strikethrough in markdown. Not the original version spec’d by John Gruber at least. He even wrote about the explicit design choice to leave it off, which I found pretty interesting.

So, if I want to strike, what to do?

There’s nothing I can do!

HTML to the rescue. Instead of using tildes, I can use the <del> tag (as I did in the line above)!

This is very similar to my solution for super- and subscripts with markdown: rendering markdown into HTML is powerful.