How Markdown Took Over the World 45
22 years agodeveloper and columnist John Gruber released Markdowna simple plain-text formatting system designed to spare writers the headache of memorizing arcane HTML tags. As technologist Anil Dash writes in a long pieceMarkdown has since embedded itself into nearly every corner of modern computing.
Aaron Swartzthen seventeen years oldserved as the beta tester before its quiet March 2004 debut. Google eventually added Markdown support to Docs after more than a decade of user requests; Microsoft put it in Notepad; SlackWhatsAppDiscordand Apple Notes all support it now. Dash writes: The part about not doing this stuff solely for money mattersbecause even the most advanced LLM systems todaywhat the big AI companies call their "frontier" modelsrequire complex orchestration that's carefully scripted by people who've tuned their prompts for these systems through countless rounds of trial and error. They've iterated and tested and watched for the results as these systems hallucinated or failed or ran amokchewing up countless resources along the way. And sometimesthey generated genuinely astonishing outputsthings that are truly amazing to consider that modern technology can achieve. The rate of progress and evolutioneven factoring in the mind-boggling amounts of investment that are going into these systemsis rivaled only by the initial development of the personal computer or the Internetor the early space race.
And all of it -- all of it -- is controlled through Markdown files. When you see the brilliant work shown off from somebody who's bragging about what they made ChatGPT generate for themor someone is understandably proud about the code that they got Claude to createall of the most advanced work has been prompted in Markdown. Though where the logic of Markdown was originally a very simple version of "use human language to tell the machine what to do"the implications have gotten far more dire when they use a format designed to help expresss "make this **bold**" to tell the computer itself "make this imaginary girlfriend more compliant".
Aaron Swartzthen seventeen years oldserved as the beta tester before its quiet March 2004 debut. Google eventually added Markdown support to Docs after more than a decade of user requests; Microsoft put it in Notepad; SlackWhatsAppDiscordand Apple Notes all support it now. Dash writes: The part about not doing this stuff solely for money mattersbecause even the most advanced LLM systems todaywhat the big AI companies call their "frontier" modelsrequire complex orchestration that's carefully scripted by people who've tuned their prompts for these systems through countless rounds of trial and error. They've iterated and tested and watched for the results as these systems hallucinated or failed or ran amokchewing up countless resources along the way. And sometimesthey generated genuinely astonishing outputsthings that are truly amazing to consider that modern technology can achieve. The rate of progress and evolutioneven factoring in the mind-boggling amounts of investment that are going into these systemsis rivaled only by the initial development of the personal computer or the Internetor the early space race.
And all of it -- all of it -- is controlled through Markdown files. When you see the brilliant work shown off from somebody who's bragging about what they made ChatGPT generate for themor someone is understandably proud about the code that they got Claude to createall of the most advanced work has been prompted in Markdown. Though where the logic of Markdown was originally a very simple version of "use human language to tell the machine what to do"the implications have gotten far more dire when they use a format designed to help expresss "make this **bold**" to tell the computer itself "make this imaginary girlfriend more compliant".
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How Markdown Took Over the World
"the headache of memorizing arcane HTML tags" (Score:5Funny)
Yeswho can remember some esoteric stuff like <i> for italic or <b> for bold? It's a lot easier to remember that your asterisks will be converted. Thanks Markdown!
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Re:"the headache of memorizing arcane HTML tags" (Score:4Funny)
Whatthese doesn't seem intuitively obvious to you?
Image: 
Strikethrough: ~~The world is flat.~~
Highlight: I need to highlight these ==very important words==
Bold: **Bold text**
Italic: *Italic Text*
Okayyeah... not to me either.
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Don't forget that many flavors of markdown don't even contain some of those directiveslike highlighting or images.
Yeahmarkdown is the suckage.
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ConceptuallyMarkdown is great. But there are too many 'dialects'hence I agree that there is a lot of suck with Markdown. Then I was pointed to the existence of 'AsciiDoc'. No dialectsmore capabilities,decent enough documentationnot a great editornot much adoption. As a wholeAsciiDoc is better than Markdown.
Howeverthen I encountered the 'xWiki'-software. The online editor is good (because you can include LibreOffice when asked during the xWiki installation procedure). The editor is also onlin
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My company is literally too stupid to use any of those; they'd rather go with their home-grown in-house blogbortion of code that's supposed to mimic github. And of course it uses a custom turdmatic 'version' of markdown that can't even do half the things that 'normal' markdown is supposed to do.
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I think the important thing is more the fact that if you type: **Bold*it will mostly render the rest of the page fine you just missed your bold tag and have an extra asterisk. But >b>bold>/v> (because of typo) would screw up everythingespecially back then.
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One asterisk for italics and two asterisks for boldobviously. Except for when those asterisks are for list itemsalso obviously.
And God help me whenever I need to make a tableespecially if I need it to be formatted a non-default way... :-P
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Doing tables in markdown is a living hell. I'd rather slide down a razor-blade banister into a pool of flaming iodine filled with sharks than do tables in markdown. And yes the sharks would have lasers for eyes.
Re: "the headache of memorizing arcane HTML tags" (Score:3)
I hadn't actually heard of Markdown before today so I had to look it upand it looks terrible.
Two examples:
Using both underscores and asterisks for italic textdespite the fact that asterisks are/were used to denote bold text.
Double spaces for a line break. What moron came up with the idea of invisible markup?!
Even BBCode seems better than Markdown to me.
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I think it was the ubiquity of HTMLrather than Markdownthat lead to its success.
It's also one of the reasons why Markdown sucks. No tabsno features that HTML doesn't support. Awkward formatting.
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What moron came up with the idea of invisible markup?!
A moron named "John Gruber" apparently.
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It's a lot easier to remember that your asterisks will be converted.
For neurotypical people not trained in programming languagesit actually is easier to use 'symbols' for *emphasis*because they work as augmenters of the written text (i.e. they take the same role as punctuationparenthesesquestion marks and exclamation signs)instead of changing the reading processing mode into a totally different mental context (i.e. as code tags instead of natural text with markings). Markdown was a clever hack to
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## Markdown
and then the same typing
<h2>HTML</h2>
I find Markdown far easier to type. And far easier to read the source format.
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I sometimes wish the Markdown header hierarchy was reversed: more hashes for outer headings.
## outer heading
# inner heading
It would reduce typingsince there are more inner headings than outer headingsand it also would enable grouping two sections into a larger section without changing all the heading levels.
But then againthe way it works is better suited for a top-down divide-and-conquer approachso it's fine the way it is.
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The point about bolditalicunderscores isthat Markdown just copies what all good mail clients do in plaintext mails. Using *emphasis* is older than the web.
The headline syntax is basically just some marker that highlights a line. In principle it should be symmetric but it is of course easier to type without ending tag. And link syntax is confusing and image syntax fucked up. Tables would be nicebut only if people align them correctly in the plaintext as well.
Numbered lists are the worst implementatio
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Exactly. The lists are messed up. There's no way to reference another list entry. Since the numbering is automatic (it ignores the numbers you use in the text) you can't write "Take the part from step 12 and do XYZ" as you have no control over what entry #12 is numbered as. Thus there needs to be some way to reference list positions and there isn't. Furtherthe lists are just basic numbers. Nested lists are also basic numbersmeaning no 5.a.12so if you have a nested lists that span multiple pages
Markdown and YAML (Score:3)
Markdown and YAML are definitely spiritual cousins.
* Simple
* Human-first editing
* Whitespace-significant / Diff-friendly
* Low-ceremony / Huffman-coded
Markdown of course is for freeform idea and narrative capturewhereas YAML is data.
Butthey both share the opinion that XML/HTML are cursed for the most common use casesand they're both mostly right on that account.
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YAML is horrible for its (nested) dict syntax. In particular the start of a dict is strange.
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It also doesn't support comments. Or at least you can put in comments but you can't read them in and output them again. Last I checked a couple years ago there were no YAML libraries that supported writing comments. If you can't read in a file then output the exact same filethat file format is a non-starter. Though to be fair XML can't do that either (whitespace characters between attributes are normalized).
Re:Markdown and YAML (Score:4Insightful)
Markdown (and all of its "infer the typesetting from unadorned plain text" brethrensuch as reStructured Text) is cursed in pretty much the opposite direction. What should be a simple tool for simple use cases has been twisted into a full-blown markup language.
The whole point to these Markdown- languages is that you can use loose formatting rules to make a document that looks good in a plain text editor and as a fully dtypeset page. So the language starts off with a few simple conventionslike *italic* and **bold**; paragraphs separated by a blank line; and conventions for several levels of section headings. Looks great in plaintext and translates easily to HTML or some other more capable markup language. Cool.
But then someone comes along and says"Heyhow about strikethrough?" So you add a rule for that. It's kind of hard to tell what the intent is in the plain text versionbut it mostly works. (The same person also asked for underlinesbut you told them to get stuffed. They must have done something to really annoy you.)
Then someone else comes along and says"I'm writing docs for Markdownand I'd really like to write them in Markdown. I need a way to turn off Markdown formatting so I can show examples." This poses a bit of a problembecause it's impossible to infer which sections need to be escaped just from the document structure. So you grudgingly add in an explicit markup sequence to designate the regions not to format. The document is still pretty readable in its plain-text form thoughso everyone's happy.
Then another person looks at it and says"I've got some tabular data here. How about if Markdown supports that?" That sounds like a pretty simple requestbut you soon realize that tables are hard. It's not just columns of numbersyou have to deal with text overflowing cell widthbordersand all sorts of other things. People traditionally handle these in ad hoc ways in plain-text documents and humans can generally get the ideabut it's hard as hell to write a parser for. There is no general way to handle everything and still have it look like simple tabular data in plain text. So you break down and add even more explicit formatting. It almostkindastill looks like a table in plain text but it's definitely harder to read than you'd like it to be.
And THEN some wise guy comes along and says"What about illustrations? How do I include illustrations?" Which is just stupid because illustrations beyond simple ASCII art by definition can't be viewed in plain text. You need to add explicit markup to include something that can not possibly be viewed in the plain text version.
And then people ask for auto-generated tables of contentindexesand footnotes. More things that just don't fit into the plain text format. More and more explicit markup. Less and less readable in a plain text editor.
Sooner or later you find that what started as a few simple formatting conventions has accreted into a full-blown markup language and you might as well have just bit the bullet and learned nroffTeXor HTML from the very start.
"nearly every corner of modern computing" (Score:5Funny)
Slashdot support (Score:5Insightful)
Has Slashdot considered support for Markdown?
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I gave up advocating for Unicode.
Though IIRC Technocrat fixed slashcode to support it a decade ago.
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Donâ(TM)t give up the fight or youâ(TM)ll wish you hadâ(TM)t.
Markdown vs HTML (Score:3)
Markdown is a very limited set of formatting codes. HTML is a huge tag language for micromanaging every aspect of a web page. The two serve different purposes and are not comparable.
Have you ever tried posting code with markdown?
Does markdown have a blink tag? I rest my case.
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In this casethe limited set of options is a featurenot a bug. Nobody wants blinking text. I rest my case.
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Nobody wants blinking text.
This is madness. How do you expect me to take you seriously when you spout insanity like this?
Everybody wants blinking text! Their just too closeted to admit it.
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Posting code? You mean like
```html
Example
```
to get a code block with highlighting for HTML syntax?
"nearly every corner of modern computing" (Score:1)
Perhaps this article should have been titled "How Large Language Models Took Over My Brain And Caused My Divorce"
Markdown has "taken over the world"? (Score:2)
What world does this refer to - some DC Universe alternative iteration of Earth?
Dire.... (Score:3)
the implications have gotten far more dire when they use a format designed to help expresss "make this **bold**" to tell the computer itself "make this imaginary girlfriend more compliant".
I shudder to think then what would have happened if another less easy alternative took over. A LaTeX ruled world would likely be more masochistic.
Multiple Failures of the W3C (Score:1)
Lack of information.... (Score:3Funny)
Can you be more clear in your writing? I'm still not sure what your position on Markdown is.
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I'll put it this way- your signature describes exactly what happened to John Gruber just before he decided to invent markdown.
HTML was not bad initially... (Score:2)
That saidMarkdown to me seems like a lesser evil todaywhich resembles early HTML more tha
Main reason for Markdown's appeal (Score:3)
The appeal of Markdown isn't because it's simpler than HTML or because the markup is intuitive.
It's because you can read Markdown source almost as easily as rendered Markdown. So that lets you include a README.md file with your software that people can easily read with lessbut that also renders into nice HTML.
Of coursethe inevitable feature creep from various extensions to Markdown is starting to make this source-readability feature less true.
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Do you know markdown.css? It's a CSS file that changes HTML tags to show markdown syntax instead. It's quite funny that you can do this with CSS.
Markdown and its 100 dialects (Score:2)
It's not like there is one standardbut there are as many as there are parsers. To create another onepeople specified CommonMark and now you can guess if it is Markdown dialect #42 or CommonMark (Markdown dialect #101) when you are allowed to use MarkDown.
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