Markdown filled an obvious void: the need for something with more formatting capability than plain text, but editable and version-controllable as plain text, without the obnoxious verbosity and complexity of typical markup languages: i.e. more or less readable as plain text also.
How Markdown took over the world
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Re: How Markdown took over the world
#32This 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…
Markdown allows HTML to be mixed freely. Not all implementations allow it. But the whole point was allowing a fallback to HTML if Markdown couldn't do what you needed. So its not even an option of switching from MD to HTML/CSS, its just an addition when needed.
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#33Re: How Markdown took over the world
#34This 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…
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Re: How Markdown took over the world
#35Here'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?
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#36Markdown 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.
Typst is lovely.
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#37Markdown 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.
I've been enjoying Typst. I worry that much of it is too complex for many end users. I'm musing about having end users draft stuff in markdown, then render that markdown with Typst templates.
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#38This 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…
Java isn't worse than C++; it has a much more capable run-time, something which is left as an implementation-defined footnote in C++.
Java had a leg-up over C++ by several decades in having a concurrency story (at all) in the language.
I wouldn't use std:: anything for threads even in a greenfield C++ project today.
Garbage collection is more advanced than the primitive management tools available in C++, like smart pointers to reference counted or exclusively owned objects: those approaches are strictly worse than the correct, gold-standard solution to the object lifetime problem.
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#39I love it. Almost as much as I do org mode.
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 her…
and were introduced as the supposedly semantic counterparts to the supposedly physical and . That never made a lot of sense, and then later and were redefined to be some subtly different semantic elements. Which also never really made sense. In the end, they both still mean italics and bold, unless you go out of your way to give them a different styling.