![]() ![]() Gruber's inspiration was that email-style plain text formatting was pretty great, and if you could automatically convert that to HTML for web publishing and rich text for everything else, you might finally get the best of both worlds.Īnd that's why we have Markdown. If only you could combine the consistency of HTML and the simplicity of rich text. That is until you write something in Word and paste it into WordPress-and it might be fine, or it might be irretrievably broken. Great, even, in writing-focused tools like Medium. Only, now you had to wrap around every bit of text you wanted in bold, and woe betides if you forgot to close out the formatting.ĬMS tools like WordPress tried to bridge the gap, with simple rich text editors that'd translate your text into HTML-and today, they're generally fine. Then you'd write HTML with headings and bold text and any formatting you want-and paired with the CSS, it would look consistently great. You would define your style, your colors, fonts, and more, in CSS. ![]() HTML-especially when paired with CSS-promised consistency at the expense of simplicity. Anyone could make a document look appealing or appalling. Rich text promised beauty, text formatted to your heart's content. Slowly a syntax of symbols formed around early digital writing, especially in email, and we learned to read the symbols as formatting. Bullet lists could be added with dashes, ordered lists with numbers, periods, and lines. Quotes could be offset with a greater-than symbol. You couldn't make your headlines bold, but you could type a line of dashes or equal symbols underneath to highlight them. Much like typewriters, you were limited only by your creativity on early computers. You couldn't bold or strikethrough text, or even change fonts and colors on the earliest software. It all started in 2004 when John Gruber introduced Markdown as "Email-style writing for the web."Ĭomputing started with plain text, typewriter-style, with letters and symbols and little else. ![]()
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