Markdown is pretty cool. It’s flexible, comes in different flavours, and it’s everywhere. Anil Dash goes into the history of markdown and blogging (and some of my problems with CMSes) in his latest post:
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.
The other dirty little secret was, typing in the box in that old blogging app could be… pretty wonky sometimes. People who wanted to do normal things like include an image or link in their blog post, or even just make some text bold, often had to learn somewhat-obscure HTML formatting, memorizing the actual language that’s used to make web pages. Not everybody knew all the details of how to make pages that way, and if they made even one small mistake, sometimes they could break the whole design of their site. It made things feel very fraught every time a writer went to publish something new online, and got in the way of the increasingly-fast pace of sharing ideas now that social media was taking over the public conversation.
Anyways, there’s some interesting context with things I’ve been mulling over (for another blog post that I’m revising, but should be out soon), including Aaron Schwarz, RSS, podcasts, etc.
Dash’s entire post is a strong reminder that the literal skeleton that defines modern AI infrastructure, started as a conversation between a blogger and a teenager. Powerful tools are built for humans, by humans.
But I do think what’s really powerful is this section:
The people who make the real Internet and the real innovations also don’t look for ways to hurt the world around them, or the people around them. Sometimes, as in the case of Aaron, the world hurts them more than anyone should ever have to bear. I know not everybody cares that much about plain text files on the Internet; I will readily admit I am a huge nerd about this stuff in a way that maybe most normal people are not. But I do think everybody cares about some part of the wonderful stuff on the Internet in this way, and I want to fight to make sure that everybody can understand that it’s not just five terrible tycoons who built this shit. Real people did. Good people. I saw them do it.
The trillion-dollar AI industry’s system for controlling their most advanced platforms is a plain text format one guy made up for his blog and then bounced off of a 17-year-old kid before sharing it with the world for free. You’re welcome, Time Magazine’s people of the year, The Architects of AI. Their achievement is every bit as impressive as yours.
If you love the internet, the whole piece is an excellent read (including the 10 reasons markdown was successful). It’s also worth following John Gruber over at Daring Fireball.