https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/10/markdown-throwdown-what-happens-when-foss-software-gets-corporate-backing/
Aurich Lawson
Markdown is a Perl script that converts plain text into Web-ready HTML; it's also a shorthand syntax for writing HTML tags without needing to write the actual HTML. Markdown has been around for a decade now, but it hasn't seen an update in all that time—nearly unheard of for a piece of software. In that light, the fact that Markdown continues to work at all is somewhat amazing.
Regrettably, "works" and "works well" are not the same thing. Markdown, despite its longevity, has bugs. But here, the software has an advantage. As free and open source (FOSS) software, licensed under a BSD-style license, anyone can fork Markdown and fix those bugs.
Recently, a group of developers set out to fix some of those bugs, creating what they call a "standard" version of Markdown. From a pure code standpoint, the results are great. Yet there was no surplus of gratitude. Instead, the "standard" group found itself at the center of a much larger and very contentious debate, one that's ultimately about who we want in control of the tools we use.
The Web turned the whole world into writers. Never in the history of the human race have so many people produced so much text. The Web has not, however, turned the whole world into writers of HTML. If writing HTML were a requirement to writing on the Web, very few people would be writing on the Web.
Not that it's particularly hard to write HTML. Only a small subset of the hundreds of HTML tags actually end up in the average bit of text. Most of the time you can get by with paragraph tags, em, strong, and anchor tags for links. (And of course list tags—where would the modern Web be without list tags?)
In other words, it's not that hard to write HTML. But it is a pain.
Typing out all those tags creates an extra wall between you and your thoughts. No one wants to put <p> at the start of every paragraph and then </p> at the end, we just want to hit return and keep typing, which is what I did at the end of the previous paragraph. In fact, despite the fact that you're reading this article as a rendered bit of HTML in a webpage, I have not typed a single HTML tag while writing it.
Chances are you posted something on Twitter today, chatted with your friends on Facebook, wrote something on your WordPress blog, posted something to Tumblr, committed a bit of code to GitHub, answered a question on Stack Overflow, or did a hundred other things that ended up rendered in HTML. You most likely did all that without ever actually typing any HTML tags.
Most of the time HTML is hidden by a "rich" text editor, which takes care of creating all the necessary HTML tags for you. WordPress, Tumblr, and other sites not aimed at developers tend to use rich text editors.
But developers and the sites they interact with, on the other hand, often use Markdown.
Markdown co-creator John Gruber at Webstock 2013.
Markdown began life as a little Perl script written by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz back in 2004. Gruber had just started writing daringfireball.net and quickly realized that the article-as-a-fragment-of-HTML model that most publishing systems used at the time was lacking. Like most of us, Gruber wanted to edit and preview his writing in the text editor of his choice before pasting that text into the publishing system.
HTML is great at many things, but reading raw HTML is terrible. HTML is a markup language, a second stage presentation format. That is, you want to get words on the Web and so the first stage is to type those words; the second is to add HTML so they look the way you intended in a browser. No one wants to read, let alone try to edit, text when it's littered with HTML tags.