I missed Anil Dash’s lovely essay covering some of the history of Markdown

I was very late to the Markdown side of things, however text files were always my jam, certainly professionally (there is not a callcenter agent in the world that didn’t have a thin Notepad window taking up a small slice on the left or right hand side of their screens jotting notes and copying and pasting things in their tools.) In a tech news cycle dominated by trillions of dollars of personal wealth to a single person, and technologies that are probably making us more stupid, it is easy to forget that what has made the internet work are fundamentally standards, and compatible formats. Anyways, you should read the entire thing, then listen to John Gruber talk to the crew at The Vergecast about his creation. From Anil Dash “How Markdown Took Over the World - Jan, 2026: 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…