How Markdown took over the world

There's something really interesting about the constraints given by plain text that you would lose with What You See Is What You Get (or, the ever-unfortunate acronym WYSIWYG) controls. I almost think what you get in that case is an unfortunate mindset-shift towards What You See Is All There Is (or, an incredibly dope acronym, WYSIATI).

Buried in here the mention of Textile.

IYKYK. Joyent. TextDrive. Textpattern CMS.

Imagining an alternate universe where it might have been Textile. https://textile-lang.com/

Really it comes down to historically the time and place when Markdown was needed and the power of momentum leading to its mass adoption.

> that year’s largely uninspiring slate of U.S. presidential candidates like Wesley Clark, Gary Hart and, yes, Howard Dean helped propel blogs into mainstream awareness

Gary Hart?

The history told here has many errors and omissions and, I would say, paints a misleading picture.

Markdown did not come up with the idea of lightweight markup languages (LMLs). It just happened to become the most popular one, for reasons that the article doesn’t really address. There were other LMLs before and after Markdown. (It does mention Textile later on, but doesn’t mention that there were a number of others, and that it was a field that had been steadily developing.)

> What if you could just write out the text and then the link, sort of like you might within an email? Like: [Anil Dash’s blog](https://anildash.com)!

No one would ever have spelled it like that. It would rather have been either “Anil Dash’s blog (https://anildash.com)” or “Anil Dash’s blog <https://anildash.com>”.

> If mark_up_ is complicated, then the opposite of that complexity must be… markd_own_.

I’m guessing this was intended to have actual italics. (Clearly it wasn’t checked after writing, or else the third underscore would have been shifted before the d.) This shows one of the problems of Markdown. (“_anti_commercial” later has the same problem.) Also why you should prefer * for italics rather than _ when writing Markdown, because in CommonMark it allows you to mark up partial words. Throw away Prettier’s Markdown formatting, by the way, it’s terrible and if you’re not careful may destroy your content, and it insists on underscore for italics.

> Hitting the Mark

> [Stuff about Markdown becoming supported by Google Docs, Microsoft Notepad, Slack, WhatsApp, Discord, Apple Notes.]

A lot of this is wrong:

• What most of them have added is an input mode for their WYSIWYG editor which is best expressed as inspired by Markdown. If you want to actually deal in Markdown, they are always infuriatingly incomplete and incompatible. At best (and it’s never even that good) you’re only typing Markdown, not editing Markdown.

• What most of the rest of them have is a lightweight markup language only superficially similar to Markdown. Slack’s mrkdwn and WhatsApp’s formatting are this.

> The Ten Technical Reasons Markdown Won

I’ll grant 1 as valid but non-technical. 2 as valid for Markdown and less valid for other LMLs for reasons that I’ll get into shortly. 3 as valid for Markdown but also some other LMLs that already existed. 4 as valid and somewhat technical. 5 I won’t grant as distinct from 4. 6… well, the key there is actually that correctness isn’t as important as some of us would like. The flavours part of it was more a building up of technical debt. 7, 8, 9 and 10 I will not grant as reasons that Markdown won—several other LMLs already existed with the same benefits.

But it really misses out on the big reason, though 2 and 6 nudge on it:

Markdown won because it was simple, and extended HTML. It was horribly underspecified and all early implementations were all awfully buggy, inconsistent and incompatible, but it was simple and we didn’t care so much about those problems in those days (for better or for worse). People could implement Markdown themselves in an hour or two.

Nowadays, people familiar with Markdown will look baffled at some of reStructuredText’s syntaxes, but at the time I’d say Markdown and reStructuredText were similarly weird, just in different areas. When getting away from things like BBCode which was almost just HTML with square brackets, and Textile which had more idiosyncratic spellings (I mean things like “bq. ” where email had “> ” on every line), reStructuredText and Markdown were about equal.

reStructuredText is way more technically sound. It’s more capable than Markdown, and there’s none of the wild and incompatible fragmentation. But reStructuredText is heavy to implement, and if you only care about outputting HTML and only for yourself, it’s actually harder to extend—you’ll have to define a node type and extend the writer to know what to do with it, or else use the “raw” directive or role. Whereas with Markdown, you just wrote HTML and hoped for the best. Because Markdown was such a mess. But you’d get it right faster than in reStructuredText.

It’s no coincidence that there’s only one major implementation of each of reStructuredText and AsciiDoc, and only three or four total for each. They were designed for bigger, heavier things. Markdown was designed for simplicity at the cost of correctness… just like HTML was.

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Sorry, I'm going to be a downer. I've been around for a long time too, saw many formats come and go (even contributed to some myself). I think Markdown is super neat and handy, but this statement "The trillion-dollar AI industry's system for controlling their most advanced platforms is a plain text format... Their achievement is every bit as impressive as yours." ..is way off. NN math & engineering has been refined for ~50 years (give or take) and scaled to mindboggling levels. For better or worse, it is in the process of transforming how society functions (just like the internet and mobile phones did). Building modern advanced NN/AI requires extremely sophisticated and advanced science, hardware & algorithms; the format of the prompts conventionally used by some are a handy but fairly trivial part of the endeavor.