I Love Markdown
I learned to type with software that taught typing by telling you where to place your fingers on the keyboard and gave you a score based on how fast and accurately you typed random words. Gamifying by using words per minute as a high score is exactly the kind of simplistic genius solution I love to the problem of how do we make personal computing accessible.
This was around 2004, which happened to be the year Markdown was invented. No wonder I didn't know about it when I learned to type. It would take a few years yet to grow and be adopted and I only became familiar with it around 2012, and then I became sort of 'fluent' in it a few years ago in 2022, once I started using it extensively with the note-taking method in Obsidian, and the main appeal of it was markdown files as the main format for notes.
While writing this, I thought I should look up the Wikipedia page for Markdown, so I can thank the people who invented it since I love it so much. And I did, and it's where I discovered that it's so new, and that it's evolved since then to have some standardization (but even then, there is a lot of bastardized implementation with many variations).
John Gruber published Introducing Markdown on his blog in March of 2004. Wikipedia mentions he used Aaron Swartz as his 'sounding board', giving a tweet as a reference for that and I can't open that website, so let's believe that to be true. But I know that name, and so I did go to Aaron Swartz's Wikipedia page and discovered he also helped in the development of RSS, which I also didn't know about his involvement in, I only knew him from his work with Reddit and the other work that led to his death. John also published the philosophy of markdown along with the documentation, which I'll quote here:
Markdown is intended to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is feasible.
Readability, however, is emphasized above all else. A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters — including Setext, atx, Textile, reStructuredText, Grutatext, and EtText — the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.
To this end, Markdown’s syntax is comprised entirely of punctuation characters, which punctuation characters have been carefully chosen so as to look like what they mean. E.g., asterisks around a word actually look like emphasis. Markdown lists look like, well, lists. Even blockquotes look like quoted passages of text, assuming you’ve ever used email.
And, by the way, I do love email.
There's also a bit more:
Markdown’s syntax is intended for one purpose: to be used as a format for writing for the web.
Markdown is not a replacement for HTML, or even close to it. Its syntax is very small, corresponding only to a very small subset of HTML tags. The idea is not to create a syntax that makes it easier to insert HTML tags. In my opinion, HTML tags are already easy to insert. The idea for Markdown is to make it easy to read, write, and edit prose. HTML is a publishing format; Markdown is a writing format. Thus, Markdown’s formatting syntax only addresses issues that can be conveyed in plain text.
And I also love prose.
I was destined to love Markdown.
Reaching this point took over twenty years, which is so long and also practically nothing, and now the rate of tech development and adoption is so ridiculous.
I love that now I can write Markdown in plaintext in Notepad (or rather, my plaintext editor of choice, Notepads) if I had to and put it Obsidian or post it here on Bear, and all the formatting stays intact. I'm not a big emoji user, I like consistency (have you seen the abomination that's the Windows 11 emoji set?) and I like that Markdown is the equivalent of writing digitally the way I write longhand, where I can emphasize or write over something again and in exchange for underlining, I get links, which I'm also a big fan of and have been since the day I clicked the first hyperlink and it took me somewhere new.
So, thank you, John Gruber and Aaron Swartz and the many contributors to Markdown, and everyone who continues developing things that use it. I was never going to be an Emacs or Vim person, and this is exactly the type of digital text format I never knew I needed and now that I know it, I can't live without it.
'* John Gruber still publishes on his blog, DaringFireball.net, so go check that out to see what he's up to, if you didn't click any of the other links.