juicerblog demo a place for prose, code, and longer thoughts

Markdown is enough

Ed Maxedon

By Ed Maxedon

· 1 min read · metawriting

Twenty years of WYSIWYG editors lost to a syntax invented for read-this-as-text emails. The lesson, in retrospect, is obvious: text is the universal interchange format, and markdown is the smallest possible layer of structure on top of it.

Why markdown won

A specification readable by ten-year-olds. A toolchain that runs in any language. Diffs that highlight prose, not bracket-soup.

You can read a markdown file as plain text and never miss a thing. You can also render it to HTML, PDF, an EPUB, a man page. The format encodes intent (# Heading, **bold**) without committing to a presentation.

What it isn’t

  • Not a layout language. Use HTML or CSS for that.
  • Not a programming language. No conditionals, no loops, no data flow.
  • Not WYSIWYG. The preview is downstream of the source.

These limits are what makes markdown durable. Add a third comma and you get reST; add a fourth and you get TeX. Each step toward power is a step away from “anyone can author this on a phone.”