Markdown is for humans

Developers and nerds have seemed satisfied with Markdown as a plain text format for a long time. Now, I see Markdown approaching the edges of the mainstream. I casually mentioned Markdown in conversation with some of my schoolteacher friends and one of them nodded with recognition. That’s new. Maybe it’s because Google Docs enabled Markdown editing back in 2022. Or because, in 2026, Apple Notes enabled the import and export of Markdown-formatted documents. Markdown’s creator, John Gruber, wrote that the surge in Markdown’s popularity could be attributed to widespread LLM usage. And yeah, I’ve definitely seen LLM output filled with Markdown. Maybe the schoolteachers are, too. Whether I’m speaking with software developers, technical writers, or schoolteachers, though, I see many of them misunderstanding what I think is the innovation of Markdown. Compared to the other historical plain text markup formats like Setext and BBCode, reading and writing full documents in plain text is easy…