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Relative to widespread brand recognition, I guess, and relative to similar initiatives. But indeed, Markdown — as in, the concept of _lightweight markup_ — pred
by rhythmvs 11y ago
Relative to widespread brand recognition, I guess, and relative to similar initiatives. But indeed, Markdown — as in, the concept of _lightweight markup_ — predates the Web and is at least as old as Usenet. I footnote 9, I linked to my Github repo with Markdown resources; there you’ll find the following chronology:
- Setext (Ian Feldman, 1992)
- AFT (Todd Coram, 1999)
- Grutatxt (Ángel Ortega, 2000)
- atx (Aaron Swartz, 2002)
- AsciiDoc (Stuart Rackham, 2002)
- MediaWiki (Magnus Manske & Lee Daniel Crocker, 2002)
- reStructuredText (David Goodger, 2002)
- Org-mode (Carsten Dominik, 2003)
- Textile (Dean Allen, 2004)
- Markdown (John Gruber & Aaron Swartz, 2004)
- jolux 11y agoYes, I'm quite aware of the history, which is why I thought it was strange that you referred to it as "relatively new." Otherwise, it's a great post.
- rhythmvs 11y agoThanks! And yeah, if people would only know their history… Relatively new, to me, unfortunately, means that lightweight markup still is not something which the broader public is familiar with, not even by its proxy brandname “Markdown”, even with big outlets (e.g. Reddit) pushing it forward.