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That does not make it good.
Oh, it totally sucks. I'm pointing out that the pain didn't end in the 90's, and continues 30 years later :-(
Shameless plug, I’m writing the book on how to publish YOUR book with Markdown. https://www.48hourpress.com/publish-with-markdown/
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More likely because the whole point of Markdown was to be embedded in text, not a freestanding format for an entire document.
This is exactly why. It is my assumption that Gruber chose ‘.text’ over ‘.txt’ for several reasons. To give it a little difference when searching for files. To be more legible to non-computer people. And finally, while Classic MacOS did not use file extensions, the Resource Fork type code for text files was ‘TEXT’
> Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers.
Ergo they’re not Markdown documents, they’re text files that can be converted into HTML using Markdown.
I 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. https://github.com/nzoschke/gistdeck
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Your plain text editor is the markdown reader. That’s the point.
It really would be nice to have a convenient renderer for it though. It's genuinely surprising something like firefox doesn't have a markdown reader builtin already.
Are there any ways to type email in markdown? Never thought of it so far...
Here'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.
Funny that he didn't use the .md extension. Maybe because he started doing it before he expected his markup would merit its own filetype?
(I personally use “.text” for my own files, and have BBEdit set to use Markdown syntax coloring for that extension, which is why I never saw a need to endorse an official extension.)"
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/01/08/markdown-extens...
This 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…