Anil Dash: How Markdown Took Over the World:

As hard as it may be to believeback in 2004the default was that people made new standards for open technologies like Markdownand just shared them freely for the good of the internetand the worldand then went on about their lives. If it happened to have unleashed billions of dollars of value for othersthen so much the better. If they got some credit along the waythat was greattoo. But mostly you just did it to solve a problem for yourself and for other like-minded people. And alsomaybeto help make sure that some jerk didn’t otherwise create some horrible proprietary alternative that would lock everybody into their terrible inferior version forever instead.

A great essay by Dashabout everyone's favorite plain text format and the why and how of the times.

I love Markdown. All of Acorn's documentation is in written in Markdownand the same with Retrobatch's. All my notes these days are in Markdown too.

Like many things that we come to rely onMarkdown was probably inevitable. However we could have ended up with something that absolutely suckedbut we didn'tand we have John Gruber's good taste to thank for that.