Anil DashJan 9
I've been working on this one for a while. The multi-trillion-dollar AI industry? Their *most advanced platforms* are controlled by a plain text format that John Gruber made up for his blog, and then bounced off of a 17-year-old Aaron Swartz, before sharing it with the world for free. *That* is the internet. Here's the amazing (true!) story of how Markdown took over the world. https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/09/how-markdown-took-over-the-world/
How Markdown took over the world

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Anil Dash
Show threadLuke KaniesJan 9

@anildash thanks for this. Still kinda bummed it won instead of Restructred Text, but I understand why.

Now if John would just release it to some kind of standards committee, so it could move forward, instead of shouting down anyone who tries to do so.

Show threadAnil Dash
@lkanies it took me a while to arrive at this conclusion, but I will say that I think it has succeeded and thrived precisely because he did *not* do that. Maybe I'll write up a document about why I think that. I think RSS also amply illustrates that point.
Jan 9 at 5:09pmWeb
Show threadLuke KaniesJan 9

@anildash I’d certainly be interested in that article.

I note your reference to the different flavors as a positive. It’s hard to see it that way. Or rather, it’s hard to see *this many* flavors as a positive. It feels like we’re far past a point where we could define a superset of the format that would cover a lot more use cases with only marginally more complexity.

I would not prefer a standards committee if John were acting like the BDFL of Markdown(tm). But if the choices are, pour amber on it, or hand it to a committee… I prefer the latter.

(Although it does seem that standards committees have these days lost the knack of making small, good standards, which is a significant mark against them.)

Show threadAnil DashJan 9
@lkanies It took me a long time to arrive at this view, but I think our tendency as technologists to want to push towards "correctness" is generally a trap. We should maybe try for anticipating a Postellian approach in the ecosystem, and have sort of "just enough" spec to get by.
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Jan 9
@anildash @lkanies John Postel would probably disagree, considering he hated how his name was used to cover up non-compliant behavior
Show threadblaineJan 9
@anildash @lkanies this is one of the things I think we got right with OAuth. There are many problems with that spec and the "ecosystem" around it, but the "Gruber-esque" alt-universe where everyone "vibe-specced" the token-auth pattern is a much worse one than ours.
Show threadChristian Kent   𝘊𝘒 :＼﹥Jan 9
@blaine @anildash @lkanies Clearly we need counterexamples like this to compare to.