How Markdown Took Over the World
- Reference: 0180569700
- News link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/01/12/2049226/how-markdown-took-over-the-world
- Source link:
Aaron Swartz, then seventeen years old, served as the beta tester before its quiet March 2004 debut. Google eventually added Markdown support to Docs after more than a decade of user requests; Microsoft put it in Notepad; Slack, WhatsApp, Discord, and Apple Notes all support it now. Dash writes:
> The part about not doing this stuff solely for money matters, because even the most advanced LLM systems today, what the big AI companies call their "frontier" models, require complex orchestration that's carefully scripted by people who've tuned their prompts for these systems through countless rounds of trial and error. They've iterated and tested and watched for the results as these systems hallucinated or failed or ran amok, chewing up countless resources along the way. And sometimes, they generated genuinely astonishing outputs, things that are truly amazing to consider that modern technology can achieve. The rate of progress and evolution, even factoring in the mind-boggling amounts of investment that are going into these systems, is rivaled only by the initial development of the personal computer or the Internet, or the early space race.
>
> And all of it -- all of it -- is controlled through Markdown files. When you see the brilliant work shown off from somebody who's bragging about what they made ChatGPT generate for them, or someone is understandably proud about the code that they got Claude to create, all of the most advanced work has been prompted in Markdown. Though where the logic of Markdown was originally a very simple version of "use human language to tell the machine what to do", the implications have gotten far more dire when they use a format designed to help expresss "make this **bold**" to tell the computer itself "make this imaginary girlfriend more compliant".
[1] https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
[2] https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/09/how-markdown-took-over-the-world/
Markdown and YAML (Score:2)
Markdown and YAML are definitely spiritual cousins.
* Simple
* Human-first editing
* Whitespace-significant / Diff-friendly
* Low-ceremony / Huffman-coded
Markdown of course is for freeform idea and narrative capture, whereas YAML is data.
But, they both share the opinion that XML/HTML are cursed for the most common use cases, and they're both mostly right on that account.
"nearly every corner of modern computing" (Score:2)
So not Slashdot then.
Slashdot support (Score:4, Insightful)
Has Slashdot considered support for Markdown?
Markdown vs HTML (Score:2)
Markdown is a very limited set of formatting codes. HTML is a huge tag language for micromanaging every aspect of a web page. The two serve different purposes and are not comparable.
Have you ever tried posting code with markdown?
Does markdown have a blink tag? I rest my case.
Re: (Score:2)
In this case, the limited set of options is a feature, not a bug. Nobody wants blinking text. I rest my case.
Re: (Score:2)
> Nobody wants blinking text.
This is madness. How do you expect me to take you seriously when you spout insanity like this?
Everybody wants blinking text! Their just too closeted to admit it.
"nearly every corner of modern computing" (Score:1)
..but let's use an orgasmic quote about the wonderous majesty of AI to illustrate this on /. Using a weirdo AI-relationship example was a creepy touch, nice!
Perhaps this article should have been titled "How Large Language Models Took Over My Brain And Caused My Divorce"
Markdown has "taken over the world"? (Score:2)
What world does this refer to - some DC Universe alternative iteration of Earth?
Dire.... (Score:2)
> the implications have gotten far more dire when they use a format designed to help expresss "make this **bold**" to tell the computer itself "make this imaginary girlfriend more compliant".
I shudder to think then what would have happened if another less easy alternative took over. A LaTeX ruled world would likely be more masochistic.
Multiple Failures of the W3C (Score:2)
From the improbably gig book of SGML, to letting the Browser Wars happen, to XML and stylesheets and DTD, and tags having been written in multiple syntaxes, to the failure to rein-in cellphone/browser specific sites--likely stemming from the $10,000 fee to join the W3C in the first place, so only corporate interests apply. That stated, Markdown is subversive to to well-being of the internet.
Fuck off, markdown has not "taken over the world" (Score:3)
As the title says, fuck off, markdown has not "taken over the world"
This is just plain stupid and as someone who works with a LOT of fucking text in a million formats, I can tell you that NO, your shitass markdown has not taken over anything except in the area of "incompatibility".
That's because every single flavor of your shitass markdown is an "off brand" and each of them was ginned up in some some incel's basement after his dick got too sore from jacking off to Nick Fuentes and Joe Rogan.
There are 40+ flavors of markdown AND THEY ALL SUCK. That's because MARKDOWN SUCKS.
Markdown is for people who fart in the bathtub and bite the bubbles, and is favored by people who live exclusively on the far left side of the Bell curve.
So in summary, fuck John Gruber- he deserves to writhe in the fires of Hell forever and EVER.
"the headache of memorizing arcane HTML tags" (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, who can remember some esoteric stuff like for italic or for bold? It's a lot easier to remember that your asterisks will be converted. Thanks Markdown!
Re: (Score:2)
Showing my age, but grew up using WordStar, so felt right at home with HTML tags
Re: (Score:3)
What, these doesn't seem intuitively obvious to you?
Image: 
Strikethrough: ~~The world is flat.~~
Highlight: I need to highlight these ==very important words==
Bold: **Bold text**
Italic: *Italic Text*
Okay, yeah... not to me either.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't forget that many flavors of markdown don't even contain some of those directives, like highlighting or images.
Yeah, markdown is the suckage.
Re: (Score:2)
One asterisk for italics and two asterisks for bold, obviously. Except for when those asterisks are for list items, also obviously.
And God help me whenever I need to make a table, especially if I need it to be formatted a non-default way... :-P
Re: (Score:2)
Doing tables in markdown is a living hell. I'd rather slide down a razor-blade banister into a pool of flaming iodine filled with sharks than do tables in markdown. And yes the sharks would have lasers for eyes.
Re: "the headache of memorizing arcane HTML tags" (Score:2)
I hadn't actually heard of Markdown before today so I had to look it up, and it looks terrible.
Two examples:
Using both underscores and asterisks for italic text, despite the fact that asterisks are/were used to denote bold text.
Double spaces for a line break. What moron came up with the idea of invisible markup?!
Even BBCode seems better than Markdown to me.
Re: (Score:3)
Markdown wins because of critical mass. Formats don't matter unless they are adopted - and markdown, somehow, won that battle and is supported practically everywhere at this point... Except slashdot because rsilvergun doesn't like change.
Re: (Score:2)
> What moron came up with the idea of invisible markup?!
A moron named "John Gruber" apparently.
Re: (Score:2)
It's a lot easier to remember that your asterisks will be converted.
For neurotypical people not trained in programming languages, it actually is easier to use 'symbols' for *emphasis*, because they work as augmenters of the written text (i.e. they take the same role as punctuation, parentheses, question marks and exclamation signs), instead of changing the reading processing mode into a totally different mental context (i.e. as code tags instead of natural text with markings). Markdown was a clever hack to