In a conversation elsewhere recently I wrote: > I think Markdown is popular because it’s a reasonably intuitive bridge between how we format handwritten docume

In a conversation elsewhere recently I wrote: > I think Markdown is popular because it’s a reasonably intuitive bridge between how we format handwritten documents (which is itself a blend of what makes sense on the page, and an approximation of ~spoken rhetoric) and HTML. > In some cases (like the table example), what’s trivial on the page is painful with a keyboard. The technologies that shaped the old idioms didn’t have editability as a selection pressure. You can make a few edits inline, but at some point you’ll just have to rewrite the document. > Much of the power and pain of code are byproducts of the machines forcing us to be explicit, but we didn’t have the foresight to spend centuries molding ourselves (human languages, pedagogy, rhetoric) around that kind of precision. Markdown meets us very close to where we are. The other path, I think, entails developing toolchains that do expect that precision and requiring the humans to do the changing. I guess the split between the ease of a format for reading/writing is an extension of the difference between shorthand or even cursive and print when it comes to these affordances.