The Story Behind Markdown

Advice to the author:<p>This is a subject I am interested in, so I began your article eagerly, but had to stop about halfway through out of frustration. Please consider these as the constructive suggestions that I intend them to be:<p>Think about the story you want to tell. Maybe make an outline or diagram, marking at which points you will introduce which facts.<p>Example: For some reason something called Commonmark is abruptly mentioned, with a link to spec documents that would seem to be of only technical interest. What is this, and how is it connected to anything else?<p>Do enough research so that you know the highest peaks in the landscape. Why describe the foothills and take no notice of the prominent mountaintop right in front of us?<p>Example: the bits about the comics were fascinating. But where is Pandoc? I don’t think I’m guilty, here, of demanding that you write the article I would have written. But Pandoc is <i>the</i> application of Markdown. It turns Markdown into a way to author HTML, TeX, PDF, Office formats, and a lot more. It‘s <i>huge</i>.<p>Anyway, I like the look of your site (but agree with others that you should not hijack browser shortcuts).

The article seems to gloss over the enormous contribution CommonMark made to ensuring a consistent and versatile interpretation of markdown, mostly by examining edge cases no one thinks about until they appear in the wild.

Just one of the great things Aaron Schwartz was involved in. So sad we lost him so young. I really do believe the Internet would somehow be a different place now if he was still around.

Am I the only person that gets annoyed that every single site wants to implement their own special and incompatible subset of markdown? Yes, I&#x27;m looking at you HackerNews, who makes it hard to block quote.

Simplified markup of text was standard on wikis, beginning with Ward&#x27;s Wiki at c2.com in 1994, a full ten years before Markdown appeared.

No mention of org-mode, which is a shame, and of course the hijacking of F is maddening.

This article mentions CommonMark, and skips lightly over the fact that it was hastily renamed that from Standard Markdown after Gruber threw an enormous hissy fit over users improving something he hadn&#x27;t touched for twelve years: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.codinghorror.com&#x2F;standard-markdown-is-now-common-markdown&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.codinghorror.com&#x2F;standard-markdown-is-now-commo...</a>

I had no idea Aaron Swartz was the originator of the principal design decisions behind Markdown:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aaronsw.com&#x2F;2002&#x2F;atx&#x2F;intro" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aaronsw.com&#x2F;2002&#x2F;atx&#x2F;intro</a><p>I had always thought that Gruber was the guy who created it. This makes so much more sense. I couldn&#x27;t make sense of it - it always felt like someone else with a different kind of capability had created it.<p>If you google &quot;markdown&quot; it says &quot;Developed by: John Gruber (in collaboration with Aaron Swartz on the syntax)&quot;<p>This now seems like a gross misrepresentation.

It&#x27;s Charles Schulz, not Charles Swartz.

Doesn&#x27;t mention org, rst, or any of the other simplified ASCII markup mini-languages. Missed opportunity.

I was introduced to markdown via RStudio. But what I really use the most nowadays is markdown for making notes during meetings etc, using a minimalist editor (Typora). I just wish it weren&#x27;t so complicated&#x2F;ugly to copy&#x2F;paste markdown to&#x2F;from other tools, like Outlook or Confluence.<p>I use only the basic and common syntactic elements (lists, headings, italics, links). IMHO the beauty of markdown is its simplicity, and trying to do complicated stuff like diagrams and tables is best left to other tools. (Another problem with the more ambitious uses is that they tend to not be standardized across markdown implementations.)

I&#x27;ve always found it strange that such a strong Mac advocate as Gruber was behind Markdown. After all, the Mac was doing real rich text in 1984, and with just one more push in the early browser days we might have got there for the web too.<p>Instead we&#x27;re left with this inconsistent mess — hell, even Gruber gets his own link syntax wrong from time to time - because good enough was the enemy of better.

Why do websites like this capture ctrl-f and make it not search the page?

The capture of cmd+f on that page is truly terrible. Why do people do this?