Rui Carmo
Anil Dash’s essay on how Markdown conquered everything is a good reminder that most “standards” don’t win because they’re perfect — they win because they’re good enough, easy to use, and easy to remember.
What I liked most is the through-line from early blogging (by which time I was also doing a PHP site generator that handled raw HTML posts) to today’s world, where LLMs are running stupefyingly complex workflows atop a pile of Markdown files.
It’s both empowering and a little unsettling that the same affordances that made writing on the web easier also make it easy to formalize instructions for systems that can do real damage.
I took a long detour through Textile before accepting Markdown had won (and am still paying the price for that, with thousands of Textile posts still to be converted), but the one thing I’ve found amusing over the years is that John Gruber created Markdown as a way to make writing HTML easier for humans.
One person can make a difference, and I’m willing to bet that when (ok, if) we ever become a Kardashev type 3 civilization we’ll still be using Markdown to write our interstellar missives.