How Markdown Took Over the World
Anil Dash (Hacker News, Mac Power Users):
If mark_up_ is complicated, then the opposite of that complexity must be… mark_down_. This kind of solution, where it’s so smart it seems obvious in hindsight, is key to Markdown’s success. John worked to make a format that was so simple that anybody could pick it up in a few minutes, and powerful enough that it could help people express pretty much anything that they wanted to include while writing on the internet.
[…]
After being nagged about it by users for more than a decade, Google finally added support for Markdown to Google Docs, though it took them years of fiddly improvements to make it truly usable. Just last year, Microsoft added support for Markdown to its venerable Notepad app, perhaps in attempt to assuage the tempers of users who were still in disbelief that Notepad had been bloated with AI features. Nearly every powerful group messaging app, from Slack to WhatsApp to Discord, has support for Markdown in messages. And even the company that indirectly inspired all of this in the first place finally got on board: the most recent version of Apple Notes finally added support for Markdown.
Alas, Apple Notes’ Markdown support does not extend to AppleScript. So there’s still no built-in way to automate getting your data out of the app in a good format.
But it’s not just the apps that you use on your phone or your laptop. For developers, Markdown has long been the lingua franca of the tools we string together to accomplish our work.
[…]
Because Markdown’s format was frozen in place (and had some super-technical details that people could debate about) and people wanted to add features over time, various communities that were implementing Markdown could add their own “flavors” of it as they needed. Popular ones came to be called Commonmark and Github-Flavored, led by various companies or teams that had divergent needs for the tool. While tech geeks tend to obsess over needing everything to be “correct”, in reality it often just doesn’t matter that much, and in the real world, the entire Internet is made up of content that barely follows the technical rules that it’s supposed to.
I’m pleasantly surprised at how ubiquitous Markdown has become, though strangely it’s still not built into WordPress. I actually don’t love it for blogging—since it can’t express a cite attribute and also I’m starting with chunks of text that are already HTML. I don’t see much benefit in mixing the two, so I continue to use plain HTML. I also continue to use reStructuredText for my product manuals. But pretty much everywhere else I use Markdown.
Previously:
- Google Docs Can Import and Export Markdown
- Automatic Grammar Agreement
- Surprises When Using Markdown in SwiftUI
- Deckset Leaves the Mac App Store
- Markdown 1.0b3
