As I was writing some tutorials recently I wanted to be able to style the html elements that Jekyll outputs with different css classes without having to write the actually html in the markdown.

For example I wanted to use a blockquote for items to be aware of that has a blue highlight as well as warnings to watch out for that has a red highlight. Here is the output of the blockquote with the different styles.

This is a normal blockquote. Without doing anything extra in markdown this is my default blockquote.

This is a warning blockquote. {:.warning}

With the kramdown markdown parser that Jekyll uses you can easily add these css classes without having to write out the html code.

Basics

In order to specify additional attributes to output in the html on the element, you start it with:

{: }

To specify a class it is

{:.MyClass}

To specify a title attribute it is

{:title="My Title"}

Below are some specific examples.

Paragraph

markdown

{:.fake-h2}
This will be styled as a p tag with the css class fake-2

html output

<p class="fake-h2">This will be styled as a p tag with the css class fake-2</p>

List

markdown

* {:.done} done - Completed this
* Not done yet

html output

<ul>
    <li class="done">done - Completed this</li>
    <li>Not done yet</li>
</ul>

blockquotes

With the blockquote you can also optional elements such as a title and id tag.

markdown

> The npm install command will take several minutes to run depending on internet speed
{:.warning}
{:title="my title"}
{: #myid }

html output

<blockquote class="warning" id="myid" title="my title">
    The npm install command will take several minutes to run depending on internet speed
</blockquote>

inline

In the previous examples, we were adding classes to the whole element. However, there are times where you just want to highlight something within an element or sentence. For these times, you write the styling the same way as above but have to put it inline with the text.

markdown

This *is*{:.underline} some `code`{:#id}{:.class}.
A [link](google.com){:rel='something'} and some **tools**{:.tools}.

this *is italic*{::}*marked*{:.special} text

html output

<p>This <em class="underline">is</em> some <code id="id" class="class highlighter-rouge"> code</code>.
A <a href="google.com" rel="something">link</a> and some <strong class="tools">tools</strong>.</p>

<p>this <em>is italic</em><em class="special">marked</em> text</p>

With these new tricks you can make you markdown output look even better without having to resort to writing a lot of html within your markdown.