How Markdown took over the world
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How Markdown took over the world
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Re: How Markdown took over the world
#2Buried 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.
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#3Buried 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 looks similar to reStructuredText: https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/restructuredtext/...
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#4Buried 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.
I liked Textile a lot better initially, and it came out first. And interestingly, both launched at the same time on the platform (Movable Type) where Markdown debuted. So it really was sort of a clean A-B test about which one users chose.
This piece was already pretty long, so I cut out most of the sidebar about Dean Allen and Textile, but he was a special guy, and certainly influential on so many parts of this era, not just Markdown.
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#5I like Markdown, and generally agree that it strikes a nice balance between correctness and usability...
...but it's delicious that this blog post also demonstrates an ambiguity in Markdown: how to handle intra-word emphasis. In the rendered output, "mark_up_" and "mark_down_" were probably intended to be "markup" and "markdown", but the underscores were instead rendered literally.
I do appreciate that Markdown's solution to ambiguities like this is dead simple - just inline some HTML.
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#6This is good and detailed, but misses a broader trend: how "worse is better" started to win - first Java over C++, then python and javascript over Java, and here markdown over Word and docbook.
When markdown emerged, docbook was getting even more elaborate, and vendors everywhere had for decades been locking people into frameworks and languages with fantastic features that were hard to use -- and then the internet bubble had popped. Then people realized they'd thrown away years building complex system, and had little tolerance for promises.
Markdown is something you can use in its native form. It's both source and destination, with a touch of future-proofing: if the opportunity arrives, you can polish it into anything, and mostly parse it yourself.
(What's surprising to me is that pandoc barely registers when compared with markdown on google trends since 2004; pandoc is the reason I switched completely to markdown in ~2010)
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#7> 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?
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#8I like Markdown, and generally agree that it strikes a nice balance between correctness and usability... ...but it's delicious that this blog post also demonstrates an ambiguity in Markdown: how to handle intra-word emphasis. In the rendered output, "mark_up_" and "mark_down_" were probably intended to be "mark up " and "mark down ", but the underscores were instead rendered literally. I do appreciate that Markdown's…
I think it's delicious how nobody, absolutely nobody, wants _ to mean "emphasis," they want italics, and yet despite there being a markdown-to-HTML build step nobody has ever done what they were told they were supposed to do to circumvent the semantic issue and use instead of .
It wouldn't even make sense for markdown if it were language-agnostic to output when that's HTML-only. I'm going to go to my grave repeating that is just version 2.
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#9I love Markdown.
My favorite Markdown creation was "GistDeck", a bookmarklet that turned a GitHub Gist of Markdown content into a slide show.
So much easier to make and share than a PowerPoint deck.
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#10This is good and detailed, but misses a broader trend: how "worse is better" started to win - first Java over C++, then python and javascript over Java, and here markdown over Word and docbook. When markdown emerged, docbook was getting even more elaborate, and vendors everywhere had for decades been locking people into frameworks and languages with fantastic features that were hard to use -- and then the internet bu…
The thing this oversees is that the interface is important, simpler is not worse, it can in fact often mean better. For example while docbook may have some technical, the user experience for someone who just wants to write some basic stuff is absolutely horrible.
If I imagine beginner-coding me, the first thing I would ask for example is why the hell not just use html by that point. Markdown is a thing I could peesent my non-technical parents unrendered and they still would be able to read the content, just fine for the most part. Try that with docbook.
Now nerds like to pretend the more powerful format is automatically superior. It isn't. Markdown is sucessful because it is so barebones and opinionated and because it forces a focus on the content over formatting. If that is what you need markdown is perfect. If it isn't, go for Latex, HTML+CSS, Typst or use InDesign or whatnot.