Markdown was cool for a while. I have switched to typst and boy is that an improvement. It’s the love child of latex and markdown. With markdown you’d still have to embed latex, while typst has its own thing that is nicer than latex.
How Markdown took over the world
11–20 of 353 posts
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#12I 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…
Totally fair. At least in part, I blame the choice of and : it's really not clear what the hierarchy between them is, so I just think of them as the online versions of italic and bold.
and , or and (or , or ) might have been clearer, but at this point we'll never know. Edit: apparently has been redefined to be "the idiomatic text element" rather than just italic - so perhaps it's a semantically appropriate choice here after all! https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#13I enjoyed "a curmudgeonly guy with a kind heart who right this minute is probably rewatching a Kubrick film while cheering for an absolutely indefensible sports team".
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#14What's preventing browsers from rendering a common subset of markdown without the need for browser extensions, with fallback to the current default of plaintext if parsing fails? LLM output can be copy-pasted for rendering by chat messengers and notetaking apps (e.g. DevonThink). If LLM markdown output continues to proliferate, does it become the defacto common-by-volume subset of Markdown, which browsers could standardize and render?
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#15This 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…
Comparing Markdown to Microsoft Word?
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#16Here's a fun trick: if you add .text to any URL on Markdown creator John Gruber's blog you'll get to see the hand-authored (bar the metadata and tags bits) Markdown he wrote for that entry.
Example: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/01/09/moylan.text
... and if you look closely at some of the entries you might spot custom Markdown features that aren't part of the published spec.
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#17This 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…
Comparing Markdown to Microsoft Word?
OMG I'm so happy you never had to write documentation in the 1990's!
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#18This 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 peese…
> opinionated
Markdown is the opposite of opinionated; nearly everything in the original spec can be done in more than one way. There’s two separate syntaxes to do headers, links, italics, bold, and three ways to do unordered lists.
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#19Markdown was cool for a while. I have switched to typst and boy is that an improvement. It’s the love child of latex and markdown. With markdown you’d still have to embed latex, while typst has its own thing that is nicer than latex.
the icing on the cake would be gitlab, github, etc. rendering typst like markdown
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#20Buried 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 felt that Textile was the superior Sony Betamax to Markdown's VHS.
Also, IME any no-coders I've known get freaked out by Markdown and always chose to use a rich text editor instead.