Markdown is everywhere #Vergecast

I'm the creator of what I would consider the canonical markdown. I I stopped around with it. I don't add new features. I'm not saying I never will, but I haven't in decades. I think a lot of other people if if they saw it as a more of a technical thing, they would be have been offended by all the various flavors that came out. But I have always been of the opinion, let a thousand markdowns bloom. And that it's not a syntax or a language per se, but a convention for writing plain text. And the thing that I'm happiest about isn't that markdown particularly is so popular, it's that the various hundred different ways of italicizing something in plain text, I had strong opinions about those since like the early 90s. And I thought everybody should do it my way and use the asterisks. But all the other ways, people would use the tildes for that, people would use slashes for italics. And I'm like, I wish people would do it my way. And that's really what markdown has done. Is that everybody now when they decorate plain text, they do it my way. That's all we ever have, right? A spec is like ego, right? The web is just a bunch of things we're hoping works this way. Nobody ever follows a spec. But the web is all just a bunch of things we slapped together and like this is the thing that works the way people work and and recognized that from the beginning. So you never had the ego to pretend, I'm going to write this technical spec and everybody's going to follow it. You're like, I hope they like the way I use things and maybe we will all do it this way. And I think the fact that it worked the way people work is why it took off.