How Markdown took over the world • Hacker News Board

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#341

Post by yencabulator » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 10:26 PM UTC

janwillemb wrote: post #333

thangalin wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Although it sucks that markdown is not standardized Does CommonMark count? https://spec.commonmark.org/

No, that spec is the failed attempt to standardize by Atwood et al., that Gruber sabotaged.

Another take on that is that Gruber is unable to sabotage a markdown standard from coming to exist, no matter how much of a tantrum he wants to have. I have no interest in listening to him about the topic, he's just in the way of the community and everyone is routing around the damage.

What Gruber has done is forced the spec to be called CommonMark, but as far as everyone except Gruber is concerned CommonMark is the markdown spec.

There are flavors that predate it like GFM, and extensions, but IMHO going forward it's CommonMark + possibly your extensions or it's not really Markdown.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#342

Post by yencabulator » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 10:35 PM UTC

nvader wrote: post #100

I think there is another article waiting to be written, why ReStructured Text lost. I know that in my younger years I would get a lot of flak for converting .rst files into .md when I joined projects. (As I got older I just stopped seeing .rst that much)

rST was better at structured content with its directives etc, but it was too complicated for non-techies, too much repeated punctuation and careful indenting.

Now we have markdown which is unable to express the structured parts, with a flea market of less-good extensions, some raw HTML snippets, and in general have lowered the bar to not even attempt the things rST is capable of.

Instead of rST, the markdown ecosystem is leaning toward "some fenced code blocks are magic", with user-unfriendly goop in them that is hidden by the UI (when one happens to use the one blessed UI for that flavor). And that approach can't solve inline directives.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#343

Post by esperent » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 11:07 PM UTC

VerifiedReports wrote: post #317

esperent wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hahaha, I know, right? Someone might seriously float this argument. Gee, here's a Markdown file on my computer that I'd like to read (formatted as intended). Since I don't have a lightweight reader for Markdown, let me just... 1. Open it up in a text editor 2. Launch a browser 3. Navigate to some page that allows Markdown comments. 4. Log in to comment. 5. Find something to comment on. 6. Create and paste into a comm…

Seems like a lot of steps when you could just double click the file.

If you're on Windows it'll open in notepad.exe which is a markdown viewer.

On most flavors of Linux it'll open in a markdown viewer.

That leaves Apple and Android which I don't think have built in markdown viewers. But you can just install an app.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#344

Post by syene » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 5:39 AM UTC

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #245

adityaathalye wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+strikeout+ ~code/monospace~ _subscript * Heading ** Heading 2 ** Heading 3 - bullet - [1/2] checklist summary - [ ] unchecked item - [X] checked item And so much more... I see you, mlok, you fellow person of culture :)

no-no-no -strikeout- `code` and bloody leave "-" as a dash. I so hate that it gets transformed into a dot for "bullet enthusiasts"

The two previous comments in this thread are referencing Emacs Org mode's markup syntax.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#345

Post by seymores » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 8:54 AM UTC

ctxc wrote: post #177

seymores wrote: post #170

Found myself needing to read a lot of MD docs and wanted to read them quickly in the terminal. didn't find any light, so I whipped one up quickly with Codex. It's a TUI md reader, fast and cheap on the memory, because of Rust. Give it a try if you find yourself wanting a quick MD reader in a terminal. https://github.com/seymores/mdr

That's so cool! I built a CLI app for myself and am totally going to do a gradient now!

The gradient is the "beeline", helps with readability.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#346

Post by scelerat » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 10:09 AM 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…

But Dash does acknowledge this, only slightly obliquely and I think more usefully broad:

reason #3 Markdown succeeded: Built on behaviors that already existed. It succeeded because it came from the culture it was born in. Email formatting conventions. HTML. Plain text.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#347

Post by duckmysick » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 12:07 PM UTC

dhosek wrote: post #267

duckmysick wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That made me think - are there any depictions of Markdown in movies and tv shows? I've seen a fair share of C, Java, HTML, and (in newer works) JavaScript and Python. And Perl in The Social Network. n.b.: the above quote is from The Matrix.

I think that was php in the social network.

I'm referring to the part where Mark was scraping the photos from the Harvard's houses face book pages.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#348

Post by chrisweekly » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 2:26 PM UTC

VerifiedReports wrote: post #322

chrisweekly wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try Obsidian. Its "LiveView" editor mode is fantastic.

Thanks. I don't want to launch an editor and then invoke a preview. I just want to double-click and read the damned file, formatted as intended. It's mystifying that people don't recognize the pointlessness of a markup format that's almost never rendered as the markup dictates.

You're welcome.

Respectfully, you've made some invalid assumptions. Even if your only use case is reading extant markdown, using Obsidian as your viewer probably still makes sense. Trivial, one-time config to open .md files in Read mode, and one-time system config to associate .md files with Obsidian, and voila: "double-click and read the damned file".

That said, if you were then to spend even a little time in Obsidian doing things other than reading, your "mystification" about "pointlessness" would vanish. Markdown is flexible and portable, eminently readable by machines and people (whether viewed raw or rendered), and Obsidian is an incredibly powerful tool for leveraging its capabilities.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#349

Post by rurban » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 2:27 PM UTC

That's missing the whole point.

I was there when those easy markup languages were invented. It started all with wiki's (after Stallman's info of course). The first one being C2, and then the discussion about better formatting syntax on the MeatBallWiki because we had many different wiki's back then (long before MediaWiki). I was with PhpWiki, which had a good start because every webserver had php support, but almost nobody perl.

Links should have no different text, as this would hide the target. A security problem. Mediawiki destroyed that because Jimbo had a different vision, and because they didn't care. Markdown followed because Gruber had no idea and followed Jimbo, not the consensus from the other wiki's. More support for the []() link syntax came then with inline images, even when that was a bigger security nightmare.

Headers switched from the simple ## prefixes to the underlines, which just looked better, and most engines supported both.

Markdown was just a compromise of all the existing wiki formatting, which was simple enough. It should stay simple and readable, because that's what made POD better than other more verbose formatting styles. Mostly info, rST, AsciiDoc, org-mode (which was the most verbose). Which replaced troff and TeX. People still wrote books in GNU info, rST, AsciiDoc, POD and org-mode. But Markdown looked better on both eyes, the pure ascii eyes and the formatted layout.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#350

Post by nvader » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 2:42 PM UTC

tasuki wrote: post #269

nvader wrote: post #100

I think there is another article waiting to be written, why ReStructured Text lost. I know that in my younger years I would get a lot of flak for converting .rst files into .md when I joined projects. (As I got older I just stopped seeing .rst that much)

> I know that in my younger years I would get a lot of flak for converting .rst files into .md when I joined projects. Why would you do that? Seems terribly impolite to join a project and start breaking things...

Yes. With youth comes a lot of zeal along with a lack of respect for the established ways of doing things. Having convinced myself that Markdown was "better" than ReST, I couldn't see why anyone would disagree with me.

Learning is a process.