The encyclopedia · Product & Design · Product decision · 2004-2016
Markdown won by making the source as readable as the output
John Gruber's 2004 Markdown made plain text publishable as-is; GitHub and forums adopted it, and the IETF later registered text/markdown.
Daring Fireball
the move
In December 2004 John Gruber released Markdown 1.0.1 as a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers: an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain-text format that converts to structurally valid HTML.
The design goal was explicit: to make it as readable as possible, so that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it has been marked up. The syntax borrowed from plain-text email conventions, the format everyone already typed.
Markdown was released as free software and spread without any vendor mandate: version-controlled documentation, forums and code hosting adopted it because plain text is durable and diffable. In 2016 the IETF registered the text/markdown media type (RFC 7763), describing a family of plain-text formatting syntaxes whose members include Gruber's original, and listing GitHub and Discourse among the systems using it.
why it works
- The source is readable and publishable as-is, so there is no rendering dependency.
- Plain text works with every editor, version-control system and diff tool.
- Free licensing let every platform adopt it without negotiation.
what transfers
A format wins when the artifact you already have, plain text, is the deliverable. Designing for readability first and conversion second made Markdown the default writing format of the developer world.
what came after
Markdown became the default writing format for developer platforms, including README files, issue trackers, forums and documentation sites, and RFC 7763 formalized it as the text/markdown media type in 2016. Its syntax now lives on in dialects like CommonMark and GitHub Flavored Markdown.
references
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