A great article written by someone who was there at the beginning of the web.
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Thanks for posting this. I look forward to reading it.
I’m sorry, I can’t help but laugh.
I use Markdown almost every day. I have apps specifically designed for that purpose.
And, I’m the only person in my network (family, company, church, social circle) for whom that’s true. And we’re a tech company.
“Took over the world” doesn’t even qualify as hyperbole. My goodness does the tech community consistently overestimate its own cultural centrality.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
“But that’s the point! It’s everywhere even if they don’t know it!”
The article doesn’t just claim technical ubiquity. It opens with “casual scraps of code” and “exchange a grocery list in Apple Notes or copy someone’s homework in Google Docs.” That’s explicitly claiming consumer relevance. And that claim is simply false for 99% of the population. Per tech culture policy, Dash is writing for an audience that already agrees with him.
It may “be there,” but they’re not using it.
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A different view (not mine):
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I’ll definitely read this one when I get time.
I’ve been constantly amazed how so many look past the severe limitations and, in my view, crazy choices that Markdown has.
The only thing it can truly lord over any alternative systems is ubiquity. The same can be said of Windows, Nuff said?
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For me the limitations are its strengths. I write speeches. Markdown prevents me from procrastinating by “fiddling” or dealing with design. The separation of design from content means I can easily and quickly export content in different formats with different fonts and colour scheme: one for the web, one to the read from an iPad, one for a printed version. Same markdown document, different exports. Revision control can be handled by various systems (and doesn’t get carried in the document itself - I’ve received many Word documents that include the history of the document’s creation.)
I also use markdown to clip web pages where, again, I’m usually focusing on retaining the content not the layout of the page.
Sure, when I produce a newsletter and need fine-grained control over layout I don’t use Markdown.
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I’m surprised you need any markup at all then.
How does the formatting convert to spoken words?
That’s reassuring. The roots of my I.T. career date back to the late 80’s and, AFAIK, I never heard of Markdown until after I retired.
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Regular users typically don’t know when they’re using markdown. E.g., for the first five years of Slack’s existence, all the formatting was Markdown and people just followed the formatting instructions in the chat window to type the asterisks, underscores etc. Same for Discord. It’s just an expected, unobtrusive text entry option now.
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The giant irony here is this is the task it was designed for.
There have been and indeed are alternative solutions to your “one text, multiple outputs” requirement. They are just so obviously aimed at Markdown now because of that ubiquity. Again… based on the ubiquity alone, not the markup itself.
I said above about “poor choices” in Markdown. There’s one right there.
Simple textual markup has been done many times over. Better by some than others. I wonder what it was that tipped Markdown over the top of the hill. I’d bet something to do with geeks who are Gruber’s audience. Personally, I was using a much more intuitive version before I ever knew who Gruber was or what Markdown was.
Amen, brother! Exactly my first thoughts when I saw “rules the world”
I agree; developers and product owners specifically. It was nearly the only markup syntax with mindshare, and if you wanted an editor between plain text and wysiwyg for your app or a CMS, chances are there was a well maintained markdown library, component or templating language method. This inflection point happened during the mid 2010s, as I saw it.
If Markdown has taken over the world, What has Word and Docs done? Taken over Milky way?
Smell one’s own farts something something.
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I can’t recall ever receiving a price quote, etc. since 1990, or so, that wasn’t a MS Word document. Businesses use Word and Excel formats, even if they do not actually use Microsoft software to create/read them.
Google, for example, added the ability to open, edit, and share Microsoft Office files natively within Docs, Sheets, and Slides around five years ago.
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I still don’t get the excitement around markdown.
I’ve looked at markdown and it seems to address such a limited use case, and have such limited capability, that whenever I need absolute text, I stick with the truly universal pure ASCII text.
Please, nobody start an ASCII vs EBCDIC thread - LOL ! (Extra points if you have passing familiarity with Hollerith code from my punch card days.)
IMHO, I think pdf files are the closest to a universal format that handles the complexity we want (text, fonts, plus graphics) and has a high probability of being properly processed many years into the future.
I can’t help but think this whole discussion about text markup is like a bunch of apes sitting around arguing with hand gestures about the best ways to eat raw meat totally unaware of the impeding revolution called “cooking with fire”.
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It’s definitely one of the formats recommended by the US Library of Congress.
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D’oh! So no mention of code pages either, then? 
PDF has its own battles. Not all creators are equal and not all readers are equal.
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To all the people who don’t like Markdown or think it is badly designed or just don’t get it, please stop using it and tell me why you feel forced to use it!
You are not the audience for Markdown.
It was designed for and made popular by web coders, blog writers, and old programmers like me.
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I learned the basic years ago, but never fell in love. Now, I find myself in it all the time and I appreciate it. It’s especially handy for moving between Bear and ChatGPT/Claude.
I also appreciate PDFs, but in my world they are not interchangeable.
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Well, it’s becoming hard to avoid it.
Yes, I use it. No, I’m not forced to use it. People can complain about tiny icons in menus but I can’t complain that Markdown could be so much better? More functional?
How many editors are in the market that are not WYSIWYG and are not hitched to Markdown? Code editors, yes, but a writing environment?
The audience for Markdown is people writing blog posts in text for conversion to HTML. I’d wager that’s very few of the people actually using it.
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