How Markdown took over the world • Hacker News Board

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#281

Post by thangalin » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

Johnny_Bonk wrote: post #62

I'm fairly new to all this, but my understanding is that Markdown is great for a few reasons: It's just plain text, so no vendor lock-in and you can ripgrep/fzf/grep through it Lives happily in git repos with proper diffs LLMs speak it natively - they output Markdown, they understand Markdown input Way easier for agents to parse than PDFs (which are binary, layout-focused, tables turn to mush) Can do tables (at least…

> What it can't do (as far as I understand): complex layouts, precise typography, embedded binary content, anything that needs pixel-perfect rendering.

Please see:

* https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf

* https://keenwrite.com/docs/user-manual.pdf

* https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/09/08/feature-matrix/pdf/jek...

* https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/09/08/feature-matrix/pdf/sof...

Those are Markdown documents typeset using ConTeXt. Except for Jekyll & Hide, I wrote them all.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#282

Post by xigoi » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 5:58 PM UTC

walterbell wrote: post #276

xigoi wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such thing as a common subset of Markdown. Even basic things are rendered inconsistently by different implementations. If browsers decided to add Markdown support, this would lead to another “works only in Internet Explorer” situation.

> There is no such thing as a common subset of Markdown. That was true before the widespread use of generative AI. LLM-generated markdown could _become_ the most common subset of Markdown, since machines can generate Markdown faster than humans.

“LLM generated Markdown” is not a coherent description of a language. LLMs can generate anything they have seen in their training data, which includes many incompatible dialects of Markdown.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#283

Post by pax » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 5:59 PM UTC

tomeraberbach wrote: post #93

I added Markdown support to Google Docs as a 20% project. Honestly honored to be included in this Markdown history :)

Huh, can one natively edit Markdown in Google Docs? This would be one of my main requests for gDocs (as a long time NvAlt/NvUltra daily driver), but how?

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#284

Post by inopinatus » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 6:05 PM UTC

bborud wrote: post #241

inopinatus wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem for web browsers is that markdown is technically a superset of HTML.

Why is this a problem? To me it sounds like a it would be an advantage because you have everything you need to render it already built into the software.

Rendering is trivial. The issue is standards, and the DOM. No-one can write a Markdown implementation for the core of any major web browser in a form that is simultaneously acceptable to both their technical and political governance.

Best you’ll get is a plugin. Strictly arm’s reach. Translation only.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#285

Post by tomeraberbach » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 6:07 PM UTC

pax wrote: post #283

tomeraberbach wrote: post #93

I added Markdown support to Google Docs as a 20% project. Honestly honored to be included in this Markdown history :)

Huh, can one natively edit Markdown in Google Docs? This would be one of my main requests for gDocs (as a long time NvAlt/NvUltra daily driver), but how?

There are sorta two separate features:

1. Notion-style realtime "autocomplete" for heading and inline formatting Markdown

2. Full Markdown import/export and copy/paste

These features make Docs interoperable with Markdown, but don't make it a Markdown _editor_ in my view.

Anyway, you can enable the features from Tools > Preferences > Enable Markdown

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#286

Post by wolftickets » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 6:19 PM UTC

tomeraberbach wrote: post #93

I added Markdown support to Google Docs as a 20% project. Honestly honored to be included in this Markdown history :)

I use this feature DAILY at work, you built something great here. I tend to write in md locally, this makes sharing the work with others easy. Especially to those less plaintext inclined.

One thing I did notice, I can't seem to find a way to set a default codeblock font format. The default font option isn't totally monospaced and so some ascii art looks weird :/

I don't think that has anything to do with your contribution though.

THANK YOU!

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#287

Post by walterbell » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 6:26 PM UTC

xigoi wrote: post #282

walterbell wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no such thing as a common subset of Markdown. That was true before the widespread use of generative AI. LLM-generated markdown could _become_ the most common subset of Markdown, since machines can generate Markdown faster than humans.

“LLM generated Markdown” is not a coherent description of a language. LLMs can generate anything they have seen in their training data, which includes many incompatible dialects of Markdown.

Major LLMs (e.g. ChatGPT) have a copy button for their output, yielding markdown that is already being consistently rendered by other apps, reflecting what was consistently rendered as HTML. Presumably LLM vendors have built a deterministic way of generating spec-compliant HTML and their well-defined dialect of Markdown, otherwise their chat UI output would not render consistently.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#288

Post by derefr » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 6:27 PM UTC

thelastgallon wrote: post #278

This reminds me of Adam Bosworth's talk on HTML ( https://adambosworth.net/2004/11/18/iscoc04-talk/ ): It is an ironic truth that those who seek to create systems which most assume the perfectibility of humans end up building the systems which are most soul destroying and most rigid, systems that rot from within until like great creaking rotten oak trees they collapse on top of themselves leaving a sour smell and dec…

> easier to write without using tags

...until you want to write any tabular data. The Markdown syntax for tables might look pretty when you read it, but the only time I've ever bothered to produce it has been with the help of a WYSIWYG Markdown editor (e.g. Typora). And I actively recoil from the idea of modifying one (since that could potentially change the width of a column, requiring carefully adding/removing spaces from the other cells in the column... ugh.)

Meanwhile, I've been hand-rolling + hand-modifying HTML tables with ease since the HTML4 days. HTML tables do not emit ugh-fields. (With the tradeoff that they do not visually read as tables in their source-code representation. But they still do read as cells grouped into records — and for most cases, that's almost as good.)

And yeah, sure, for embedding wholly-plaintext data tables, you could just drop some lines of CSV in a quote-fenced code block. But that doesn't work if you want that table to render with MD semantics itself, such that you can style the contents of the cells using MD syntax. Think "links to additional resources in Github READMEs."

IMHO, a format that's mostly just Markdown, but which deprecates MD's existing table syntax in favor of a much-simpler-to-write "sigil-annotated list-of-lists" syntax, would be a big hit.

(And, now that I think about it, would also probably make it simple for LLMs to spit actual headered tables at you, rather than relying on endless hierarchical bulleted lists.)

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#289

Post by pixelmonkey » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 6:40 PM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #56

Sound write-up. It is missing the #1 reason I like it though - it's fundamentally text. No format/vendor lock-in and very amenable to living in a git repo. For my note taking that's already game over right there against everything else. I don't want to worry about whatever cursed format OneNote uses is still something I can extract in 2035. I also like that it's become a defacto standard that LLMs speak. I can tell i…

Agreed. I wrote a post about the history and power of plain text in computing here:

Simple and Universal: A History of Plain Text, and Why It Matters

https://amontalenti.com/2016/06/11/simple-and-universal-a-hi...

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#290

Post by JoBrad » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 6:49 PM UTC

esperent wrote: post #120

VerifiedReports wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except there's a massive lack of Markdown VIEWERS. You find MD files in every open-source project and lots of other places, but almost no viewers that render them as intended. So you wind up looking at them as plain text, with a bunch of formatting characters in them. What's the point, then? Only just now has Windows Notepad been revised to render Markdown (I think it does now, anyway). And after searching for a Mac…

There's loads of markdown viewers, you just don't identify them as that. Try copying some markdown into these places: - A reddit comment - Microsoft Teams - Slack - Whatsapp - Discord - Google Docs - Discord - Notion - Facebook Messenger (although only on desktop I think) Etc.

Most repo browser UIs, and apps like VSCode, too.