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The Eternal Truth of Markdown
An exegesis of the most ubiquitous piece of code on the web.
Support for Markdown is embedded in nearly every online text box you’re likely to encounter, and there’s an entire economy of mobile writing and note-taking apps built on its back. This, I believe, is the cornerstone of Markdown’s success (and why related projects from that era, like reStructuredText and Setext, remain largely unknown): It looked at the world as it actually was and built on the informal conventions people were using. Markdown took common quirks of writing plaintext emails or message-board posts—like wrapping a word in asterisks to *emphasize* it—and extended those formatting customs.
Or read this on Wired