How Markdown took over the world
Nearly every bit of the high-tech world, from the most cutting-edge AI systems at the biggest companies, to the casual scraps of code cobbled together by college students, is annotated and described by the same, simple plain text format. Whether you’re trying to give complex instructions to ChatGPT, or you want to be able to exchange a grocery list in Apple Notes or copy someone’s homework in Google Docs, that same format will do the trick. The wild part is, the format wasn’t created by a conglomerate of tech tycoons, it was created by a curmudgeonly guy with a kind heart who right this minute is probably rewatching a Kubrick film while cheering for an absolutely indefensible sports team.
But it’s worth understanding how these simple little text files were born, not just because I get to brag about how generous and clever my friends are, but also because it reminds us of how the Internet really works: smart people think of good things that are crazy enough that they just might work, and then they give them away, over and over, until they slowly take over the world and make things better for everyone.
Making Their Mark
Though it’s now a building block of the contemporary Internet, like so many great things, Markdown just started out trying to solve a personal problem. In 2002, John Gruber made the unconventional decision to bet his online career on two completely irrational foundations: Apple, and blogs.
It’s hard to remember now, but in 2002, Apple was just a few years past having been on death’s door. As difficult as it may be to picture in today’s world where Apple keynotes are treated like major events, back then, almost nobody was covering Apple regularly in the tech world, let alone writing exclusively about the company. There was barely even an “tech news” scene online at all. So John’s decision to go all-in on Apple for his pioneering blog Daring Fireball was, well, a daring one. At the time when his blog started, Apple had only just launched its first iPod that worked with Windows computers, and the iPhone was still a full five years in the future. But that single-minded focus, not just on Apple, but on obsessive focus to detail in everything he covered, eventually helped inspire so much of the technology media landscape that we see today. John’s timing was also perfect — from the doldrums of that era, Apple’s stock price would rise by about 120,000% in the years after Daring Fireball started, and its cultural relevance probably increased by even more than that.
By 2004, it wasn’t just Apple that had begun to take off: blogs and social media had moved from obscurity to the very center of culture, and a new era of web technology had begun. At the beginning of that year, few people in the world even knew what a “blog” was in 2004, but by the end of the year, blogs had become not just ubiquitous, but downright cool. As unlikely as it seems now, that year’s largely uninspiring slate of U.S. presidential candidates like Wesley Clark, Gary Hart and, yes, Howard Dean helped propel blogs into mainstream awareness during the Democratic primaries, alongside online pundits who had begun weighing in on politics and the issues and cultural moments at a pace that newspapers and TV couldn’t keep up with. A lot has been written about the transformation of media during those years, but less has been written about how the media and tech of the time transformed each other.
That era of early blogging was interesting in that nearly everyone who was writing the first popular sites was also busy helping create the tools for publishing them. Just like Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz had to pioneer combining studio-style flat lighting with 35mm filming in order to define the look of the modern sitcom, or Jimi Hendrix had to work with Roger Mayer to invent the signature guitar distortion pedals that defined the sound of rock and roll, the pioneers who defined the technical format and structures of blogging were often building the very tools of creation as they went along.
I got a front row seat to these acts of creation. At the time I was working on Movable Type, which was the most popular tool for publishing “serious” blogs, and helped popularize the medium. Two of my good friends had built the tool and quickly made it into the default choice for anybody who wanted to reach a big audience; it was kind of a combination of everything people do these days on WordPress and all the various email newsletter platforms and all of the “serious” podcasts (since podcasts wouldn’t be invented for another few months). But back in those early days, we’d watch people use our tools to set up Gawker or Huffington Post one day, and Daring Fireball or Waxy.org the next, and each of them would be the first of its kind, both in terms of its design and its voice. To this day, when I see something online that I love by Julianne Escobedo Shepherd or Ta-Nehisi Coates or Nilay Patel or Annalee Newitz or any one of dozens of other brilliant writers or creators, my first thought is often, “hey! They used to type in that app that I used to make!” Because sometimes those writers would inspire us to make a new feature in the publishing tools, and sometimes they would have hacked up a new feature all by themselves in between typing up their new blog posts.
A really clear, and very simple, early example of how we learned that lesson was when we changed the size of the box that people used to type in just to create the posts on their sites. We made the box a little bit taller, mostly for aesthetic reasons. Within a few weeks, we’d found that posts on sites like Gawker had gotten longer, mostly because the box was bigger. This seems obvious now, years after we saw tweets get longer when Twitter expanded from 140 characters to 280 characters, but at the time this was a terrifying glimpse at how much power a couple of young product managers in a conference room in California would have over the media consumption of the entire world every time they made a seemingly-insignificant decision.
The other dirty little secret was, typing in the box in that old blogging app could be… pretty wonky sometimes. People who wanted to do normal things like include an image or link in their blog post, or even just make some text bold, often had to learn somewhat-obscure HTML formatting, memorizing the actual language that’s used to make web pages. Not everybody knew all the details of how to make pages that way, and if they made even one small mistake, sometimes they could break the whole design of their site. It made things feel very fraught every time a writer went to publish something new online, and got in the way of the increasingly-fast pace of sharing ideas now that social media was taking over the public conversation.
Enter John and his magical text files.
Marking up and marking down
The purpose of Markdown is really simple: It lets you use the regular characters on your keyboard which you already use while typing out things like emails, to make fancy formatting of text for the web. That HTML format that’s used to make web pages stands for HyperText Markup Language. The word “markup” there means you’re “marking up” your text with all kinds of special characters.
Only, the special characters can be kind of arcane. Want to put in a link to everybody’s favorite website? Well, you’re going to have to type in <a href="https://anildash.com/">Anil Dash’s blog</a> I could explain why, and what it all means, but honestly, you get the point — it’s a lot! Too much. What if you could just write out the text and then the link, sort of like you might within an email? Like: [Anil Dash’s blog](https://anildash.com)! And then the right thing would happen. Seems great, right?
The same thing works for things like putting a header on a page. For example, as I’m writing this right now, if I want to put a big headline on this page, I can just type #How Markdown Took Over the World and the right thing will happen.
If mark_up_ is complicated, then the opposite of that complexity must be… mark_down_. This kind of solution, where it’s so smart it seems obvious in hindsight, is key to Markdown’s success. John worked to make a format that was so simple that anybody could pick it up in a few minutes, and powerful enough that it could help people express pretty much anything that they wanted to include while writing on the internet. At a technical level, it was also easy enough to implement that John could write the code himself to make it work with Movable Type, his publishing tool of choice. (Within days, people had implemented the same feature for most of the other blogging tools of the era; these days, virtually every app that you can type text into ships with Markdown support as a feature on day one.)
Prior to launch, John had enlisted our mutual friend, the late, dearly missed Aaron Swartz, as a beta tester. In addition to being extremely fluent in every detail of the blogging technologies of the time, Aaron was, most notably, seventeen years old. And though Aaron’s activism and untimely passing have resulted in him having been turned into something of a mythological figure, one of the greatest things about Aaron was that he could be a total pain in the ass, which made him terrific at reporting bugs in your software. (One of the last email conversations I ever had with Aaron was him pointing out some obscure bugs in an open source app I was working on at the time.) No surprise, Aaron instantly understood both the potential and the power of Markdown, and was a top-tier beta tester for the technology as it was created. His astute feedback helped finely hone the final product so it was ready for the world, and when Markdown quietly debuted in March of 2004, it was clear that text files around the web were about to get a permanent upgrade.
The most surprising part of what happened next wasn’t that everybody immediately started using it to write their blogs; that was, after all, what the tool was designed to do. It’s that everybody started using Markdown to do everything else, too.
Hitting the Mark
It’s almost impossible to overstate the ubiquity of Markdown within the modern computer industry in the decades since its launch.
After being nagged about it by users for more than a decade, Google finally added support for Markdown to Google Docs, though it took them years of fiddly improvements to make it truly usable. Just last year, Microsoft added support for Markdown to its venerable Notepad app, perhaps in attempt to assuage the tempers of users who were still in disbelief that Notepad had been bloated with AI features. Nearly every powerful group messaging app, from Slack to WhatsApp to Discord, has support for Markdown in messages. And even the company that indirectly inspired all of this in the first place finally got on board: the most recent version of Apple Notes finally added support for Markdown. (It’s an especially striking launch by Apple due to its timing, shortly after John had used his platform as the most influential Apple writer in the world to blog about the utter failure of the “Apple Intelligence” AI launch.)
But it’s not just the apps that you use on your phone or your laptop. For developers, Markdown has long been the lingua franca of the tools we string together to accomplish our work. On GitHub, the platform that nearly every developer in the world uses to share their code, nearly every single repository of code on the site has at least one Markdown file that’s used to describe its contents. Many have dozens of files describing all different aspects of their project. And some of the repositories on GitHub consist of nothing but massive collections of Markdown files. The small tools and automations we run to perform routine tasks, the one-off reports that we generate to make sure something worked correctly, the confirmations that we have system email out when something goes wrong, the temporary format we use when trying to recover some old data — all of it defaults to Markdown.
As a result, there are billions of Markdown files lying around on hard drives around the world. Billions more stashed in the cloud. There are some on the phone in your pocket. Programmers leave them lying around wherever their code might someday be running. Your kid’s Nintendo Switch has Markdown files on it. If you’re listening to music, there’s probably a Markdown file on the memory chip of the tiny system that controls the headphones stuck in your ears. The Markdown is inside you right now!
Down For Whatever
So far, these were all things we could have foreseen when John first unleashed his little text tool on the world. I would have been surprised about how many people were using it, but not really the ways in which they were using it. If you’d have said “Twenty years in the future, all the different note-taking apps people use save their files using Markdown!”, I would have said, “Okay, that makes sense!”
What I wouldn’t have asked, though, was “Is John getting paid?” As hard as it may be to believe, back in 2004, the default was that people made new standards for open technologies like Markdown, and just shared them freely for the good of the internet, and the world, and then went on about their lives. If it happened to have unleashed billions of dollars of value for others, then so much the better. If they got some credit along the way, that was great, too. But mostly you just did it to solve a problem for yourself and for other like-minded people. And also, maybe, to help make sure that some jerk didn’t otherwise create some horrible proprietary alternative that would lock everybody into their terrible inferior version forever instead. (We didn’t have the word “enshittification” yet, but we did have Cory Doctorow and we did have plain text files, so we kind of knew where things were headed.)
To give a sense of the vibe of that era, the term “podcasting” had been coined just a month before Markdown was released, and went into wider use that fall, and was similarly a radically open system that wasn’t owned by any big company and that empowered people to do whatever they wanted to do to express themselves. (And podcasting was another technology that Aaron Swartz helped improve by being a brilliant pain in the ass. But I’ll save that story for another book-length essay.)
That attitude of being not-quite-_anti_commercial, but perhaps just not even really concerned with whether something was commercial or not seems downright quaint in an era when the tech tycoons are not just the wealthiest people in the world, but also some of the weirdest and most obnoxious as well. But the truth is, most people today who make technology are actually still exceedingly normal, and quite generous. It’s just that they’ve been overshadowed by their bosses who are out of their minds and building rocket ships and siring hundreds of children and embracing overt white supremacy instead of making fun tools for helping you type text, like regular people do.
The Markdown Model
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".
But we already know that the Big AI companies are run by people who don't reckon with the implications of their work. They could never understand that every single project that's even moderately ambitious on these new AI platforms is being written up in files formatted according to this system created by one guy who has never asked for a dime for this work. An entire generation of AI coders has been born since Markdown was created who probably can’t even imagine that this technology even has an "inventor". It’s just always been here, like the Moon, or Rihanna.
But it’s important for everyone to know that the Internet, and the tech industry, don’t run without the generosity and genius of regular people. It is not just billion-dollar checks and Silicon Valley boardrooms that enable creativity over years, decades, or generations — it’s often a guy with a day job who just gives a damn about doing something right, sweating the details and assuming that if he cares enough about what he makes then others will too. The majority of the technical infrastructure of the Internet was created in this way. For free, often by people in academia, or as part of their regular work, with no promise of some big payday or getting a ton of credit.
The people who make the real Internet and the real innovations also don’t look for ways to hurt the world around them, or the people around them. Sometimes, as in the case of Aaron, the world hurts them more than anyone should ever have to bear. I know not everybody cares that much about plain text files on the Internet; I will readily admit I am a huge nerd about this stuff in a way that maybe most normal people are not. But I do think everybody cares about some part of the wonderful stuff on the Internet in this way, and I want to fight to make sure that everybody can understand that it’s not just five terrible tycoons who built this shit. Real people did. Good people. I saw them do it.
The trillion-dollar AI industry's system for controlling their most advanced platforms is a plain text format one guy made up for his blog and then bounced off of a 17-year-old kid before sharing it with the world for free. You're welcome, Time Magazine's people of the year, The Architects of AI. Their achievement is every bit as impressive as yours.
The Ten Technical Reasons Markdown Won
Okay, with some of the narrative covered, what can we learn from Markdown’s success? How did this thing really take off? What could we do if we wanted to replicate something like this in the modern era? Let’s consider a few key points:
1. Had a great brand.
Okay, let’s be real: “Markdown” as a name is clever as hell. Get it it’s not markup, it’s mark down. You just can’t argue with that kind of logic. People who knew what the “M” in “HTML” stood for could understand the reference, and to everyone else, it was just a clearly-understandable name for a useful utility.
2. Solved a real problem.
This one is not obvious, but it’s really important that a new technology have a real problem that it’s trying to solve, instead of just being an abstract attempt to do something vague, like “make text files better”. Millions of people were encountering the idea that it was too difficult or inconvenient to write out full HTML by hand, and even if one had the necessary skills, it was nice to be able to do so in a format that was legible as plain text as well.
3. Built on behaviors that already existed.
This is one of the most quietly genius parts of Markdown: The format is based on the ways people had been adding emphasis and formatting to their text for years or even decades. Some of the formatting choices dated back to the early days of email, so they’d been ingrained in the culture of the internet for a full generation before Markdown existed. It was so familiar, people could be writing Markdown without even knowing it.
4. Mirrored RSS in its origin.
Around the same time that Markdown was taking off, RSS was maturing into its ubiquitous form as well. The format had existed for some years already, enabling various kinds of content syndication, but at this time, it was adding support for the technologies that would come to be known as podcasting as well. And just like RSS, Markdown was spearheaded by a smart technologist who was also more than a little stubborn about defining a format that would go on to change the way we share content on the internet. In RSS’ case, it was pioneered by Dave Winer, and with Markdown it was John Gruber, and both were tireless in extolling the virtues of the plain text formats they’d helped pioneer. They could both leverage blogs to get the word out, and to get feedback on how to build on their wins.
5. There was a community ready to help.
One great thing about a format like Markdown is that its success is never just the result of one person. Vitally, Markdown was part of a community that could build on it right from the start. Right from the beginning, Markdown was inspired by earlier works like Textile, a formatting system for plain text created by Dean Allen. Many of us appreciated and were inspired by Dean, who was a pioneer of blogging tools in the early days of social media, but if there’s a bigger fan of Dean Allen on the internet than John Gruber, I’ve never met them. Similarly, Aaron Swartz, the brilliant young technologist who’s known best known as an activist for digital rights and access, was at that time just a super brilliant teenager that a lot of us loved hacking with. He was the most valuable beta tester of Markdown prior to its release, helping to shape it into a durable and flexible format that’s stood the test of time.
6. Had the right flavor for every different context.
Because Markdown’s format was frozen in place (and had some super-technical details that people could debate about) and people wanted to add features over time, various communities that were implementing Markdown could add their own “flavors” of it as they needed. Popular ones came to be called Commonmark and Github-Flavored, led by various companies or teams that had divergent needs for the tool. While tech geeks tend to obsess over needing everything to be “correct”, in reality it often just doesn’t matter that much, and in the real world, the entire Internet is made up of content that barely follows the technical rules that it’s supposed to.
7. Released a time of change in behaviors and habits.
This is a subtle point, but an important one: Markdown came along at the right time in the evolution of its medium. You can get people to change their behaviors when they’re using a new tool, or adopting a new technology. In this case, blogging (and all of social media!) were new, so saying “here’s a new way of typing a list of bullet points” wasn’t much an additional learning curve to add to the mix. If you can take advantage of catching people while they’re already in a learning mood, you can really tap into the moment when they’re most open-minded to new things.
8. Came right on the cusp of the “build tool era”.
This one’s a bit more technical, but also important to understand. In the first era of building for the web, people often built the web’s languages of HTML, Javascript and CSS by hand, by themselves, or stitched these formats together from subsets or templates. But in many cases, these were fairly simple compositions, made up of smaller pieces that were written in the same languages. As things matured, the roles for web developers specialized (there started to be backend developers vs. front-end, or people who focused on performance vs. those who focused on visual design), and as a result the tooling for developers matured. On the other side of this transition, developers began to use many different programming languages, frameworks and tools, and the standard step before trying to deploy a website was to have an automated build process that transformed the “raw materials” of the site into the finished product. Since Markdown is a raw material that has to be transformed into HTML, it perfectly fit this new workflow as it became the de facto standard method of creation and collaboration.
9. Worked with “View source”
Most of the technologies that work best on the web enable creators to “view source” just like HTML originally did when the first web browsers were created. In this philosophy, one can look at the source code that makes up a web page, and understand how it was constructed so that you can make your own. With Markdown, it only takes one glimpse of a source Markdown file for anyone to understand how they might make a similar file of their own, or to extrapolate how they might apply analogous formatting to their own documents. There’s no teaching required when people can just see it for themselves.
10. Not encumbered in IP
This one’s obvious if you think about it, but it can’t go unsaid: There are no legal restrictions around Markdown. You wouldn’t think that anybody would be foolish or greedy enough to try to patent something as simple as Markdown, but there are many far worse examples of patent abuse in the tech industry. Fortunately, John Gruber is not an awful person, and nobody else has (yet) been brazen enough to try to usurp the format for their own misadventures in intellectual property law. As a result, nobody’s been afraid, either to use the format, or to support creating or reading the format in their apps.
