How Markdown took over the world 09 Jan 2026 2026-01-09 2026-01-09 /images/imac-g4-markdown.jpg tech, blogs, software, culture, ai, Best Of 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... 30
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, let alone writing exclusively about the company. There was barely even an “tech news” scene online at all, and virtually no one was blogging. So John’s decision to go all-in on Apple for his pioneering blog Daring Fireball was, well, a daring one. At the time, 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 detail in everything he covered, eventually helped inspire 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 themselves 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, but by the end of 2004, 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.
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