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I had no idea Aaron Swartz was the originator of the principal design decisions behind Markdown: http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/atx/intro http://www.aaronsw.com/2
by tpmx 6y ago
I had no idea Aaron Swartz was the originator of the principal design decisions behind Markdown:
http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/atx/intro http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/atx/intro
I had always thought that Gruber was the guy who created it. This makes so much more sense. I couldn't make sense of it - it always felt like someone else with a different kind of capability had created it.
If you google "markdown" it says "Developed by: John Gruber (in collaboration with Aaron Swartz on the syntax)"
This now seems like a gross misrepresentation.
- saagarjha 6y agoPlease be nice.
- tpmx 6y agoPlease be factual.
- saagarjha 6y agoThe facts are that personal attacks are not tolerated here. My comment was simply a reminder that you should already know this.
- tpmx 6y agoYou're right. I edited the comment to make it less inoffensive to Apple fans. We should really protect these people. Apple fans truly are one of the most oppressed peoples nowadays.
- chipotle_coyote 6y agoAll right, let me offer a different phrasing: Aaron Swartz created atx, and John Gruber created Markdown. The syntax between the two is similar, but not identical, as can be said for several other "plain text markup" formats that are, you know, not Markdown. (Like Textile, which was also not created by Aaron Swartz.) Not insignificantly, the original Perl script that implements Markdown was John Gruber's. It functions as a plugin for the Perl-based Movable Type blog engine because that's what Daring Fireball uses. Swartz wrote atx, by contrast, in his preferred programming language of Python. So, to be factual: John Gruber created Markdown.
- tpmx 6y agoI'd say: John Gruber and Aaron Swartz created Markdown.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rurban 6y agoHe wasn't. There was a movement amongst wiki engines to come up with a common markup format. c2 was the first but didn't participate in that. They were mostly php, perl and python engines sharing this code. We had a good common markup long before Markdown, but Markdown got popular with Wikipedia, which also refused to participate. Eventually everybody switched over to Wikipedia syntax, which was then simplified to Markdown. I never saw Swartz taking part in those discussions, we just took his RSS idea.