# The **epic** story of Markdown

0:02Hello and welcome to the VergeCast, the flagship podcast of asterisks and underlines. I'm your friend David Pierce and today on the show we're going to talk about Markdown. Now Markdown is probably very familiar to you if you're like a deep nerd about note-taking apps like I am and maybe a word you've never even heard of otherwise. If you're in that latter group, don't worry, we're going to get into it. The way to understand Markdown is basically as a way of writing text that both a computer and a human can understand. So if you're writing words and you want to bold something, right, rather than go to, you know, file and format and bold, you just put two asterisks at the beginning and at the end of the word.

0:39And that tells the computer that this is bold. Markdown is a language that computers understand and know how to translate into other things. It also just looks like emphasis, right? So when you're reading it, you see a word with two asterisks on either side and you go, oh, that's emphasis. You can do underlines for underlines. You can write a link in a specific way so that it can be read by Markdown. so you can see the title of the link and then the URL of the link itself. It's a way of writing text that both computers and humans can understand. It's a very powerful thing, and it is absolutely everywhere.

1:10All of a sudden, all of these note-taking apps are using it. Obsidian is a very popular one that lets you write in Markdown, and everything is stored on your computer as Markdown files, which are basically, again, just annotated text files. This is also kind of the lingua franca of the AI industry right now. When you make a claw.md file, the MD stands for Markdown. It's a way of writing for the computer that is simple and straightforward and that lots of people understand. Markdown is not just an inherent thing of computers. It was created. It was created by a person. And that person is John Gruber, who you might also know as the writer of the blog Daring Fireball.

1:46John's going to come on the show, as is Anil Dash, who is a longtime tech executive, was around in the early days of Markdown and really has seen it grow up into the standard it has become. We're going to talk about where Markdown came from, why it's so important that this thing became a crucial part of the way that we write text on computers, and where we go from here. The conversation is very nerdy, I will just warn you in advance, but I had a really good time, and I think you will too. But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Monday, June 15th, 2026.

2:18Fox announced that it's buying Roku in a deal valued at$22 billion. If this deal goes through, it's always a big if, the mishmash of stuff in the combined company would include all of Fox's TV networks, Tubi, Roku's streaming devices, its smart TV software, and the Roku channel. Fox says the plan is to keep Roku as the sort of ubiquitous Switzerland of the streaming industry that it has been. But of course, that's what everybody always says and nobody ever means it. In particular, I'm fascinated to see what comes of Tubi and the Roku channel, which would combine to be a very big and very powerful free streaming service.

2:53The big news all weekend was the U.S. government's bid to shut down Fable, the new super powerful AI model Anthropic released last week. The government said it was blocking its use by foreign nationals, which turns out to be such a complicated thing to enact that it works as an overall ban. It's not entirely clear that the government can actually do this, but Anthropic did in fact shut off the model. There's so much we still don't know here. Fable is basically the same model as Mythos, which Anthropic said was too dangerous to release a couple of months ago, only with some guardrails. Is it actually a security risk?

3:25Who bypassed the guardrails? What happens when they do? Who raised the alarm here? Is this just another strange turn in the fight between Anthropic and the U.S. government over who gets to decide how AI gets used? Like I said, lots of questions. Finally, The Verge's Don Preston reviewed the Honor Magic V6, a foldable phone that accomplishes three very important things. It has a battery that lasts two days. It has genuinely good ratings for dust and water resistance. And it is the thinnest foldable phone we've seen yet. It's still$2 ,000, which means you probably won't buy or ever even see it. But there are good things coming in foldables.

3:59You can read more about all of this at TheVerge.com. That's 90 Seconds on The Verge for Monday, June 15th. Support for the show comes from ServiceNow. AI is moving fast across the enterprise. But without visibility, it's just chaos. Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways. ServiceNow turns that chaos into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place. What it's doing, what it's done, and what it's about to do. So you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.

4:40I don't think I want to raise girls who are nice. Girls who are nice are pliable and do what other people tell them so that they can be liked. This week on Project Swagger, the incredible Shonda Rhimes. I felt really overwhelmed after Grace was a giant hit. And then I thought, like, well, how am I supposed to do this again? We talk about motherhood, confidence, knowing your worth, and adding tax. If you go in already thinking to yourself, I have to take a deal, I have to make this deal, you've already lost. Listen now at Project Swagger. All right, let's talk text files. Joining me now, John Gruber, who you've been on the show many times, but never as the inventor of Markdown.

5:19Welcome to the VertCast. Yes, and finally, I'm here for the thing that will go on my tombstone. I think that's right, and we're going to talk about that. Also here, Anil Dash, you did not invent Markdown, but you used it once or twice. I got a front row seat when it was created. That's exactly right. So I think, strangely, I want to talk about a very long time ago and I want to talk about right now. And those are sort of the two Markdown stories that I'm particularly fascinated by. But for folks who don't know the origin story, John, let's go all the way back to like the early aughts and sort of baby blogger John Gruber.

5:54Tell us just the brief story of where Markdown came from. I went to college in the 90s, have a computer science degree and graduated in 96 and then was doing freelance graphic design work rather than programming. But with a background in programming and being that age and being a graphic designer, what did I do? I built websites, right? It was sort of the perfect confluence of skills and interests. At least then knew HTML. Sure. It was a lot easier to know. And it's intertwined with what's the origins of Daring Fireball. But I had this inkling to start Daring Fireball like 98, 99 or something, some kind of blog.

6:34Because I wrote. I was a writer. Finally, August 2002 is when I started the site. During the year of 2002, this is where Neil comes into play. There was the, well, what do I use? What's the CMS I'm going to use? Do I build my own? Which I could have done. I still could do or use one of the things that's out there. And at the time, like WordPress didn't exist yet. And I probably wouldn't have used it anyway. But movable type just came out like the year before. It kind of immediately took over the blogging world, right? Like movable type at this time was sort of the one you choose if you're going to choose one.

7:11Yeah. And I'd more or less ruled out every other option for a CMS. And I was like, I've got to build my own. And then movable type was like close enough. And it's like, ooh. And it's like, I know that if I built my own, it would take 10 times longer than I thought it would. But that meant every single post that I wrote on Daring Fireball was written in HTML. And I'd paste HTML into the field for the body of the article. Within a year, I'd really gotten the shits of that. I can imagine. Yeah. I just, you know, I knew it. It wasn't the fact that I didn't know it. It's that I didn't like writing it.

7:48And so I'd had this series of scripts that was getting ever more complicated on my local machine where I could write in like a proto markdown and then turn it into HTML at the end and then paste that into movable type. Interesting. But it turns out I do a lot of editing after I post, you know, so having transferring to HTML and then all subsequent edits have to be in HTML. So I was like, I need to write something like this. And then Dean Allen, who's no longer with us at textism.com came out with a thing called Textile in 2001, 2002. I don't know. Summer before Markdown. And I thought about using Textile and I didn't like it enough.

8:30And one of Anil's colleagues at Six Apart, a guy named Brad Choate - Six Apart was the company that made Movable Type, that content, right? Yes, from the company that made Movable Type. Did the textile plug-in for Movable Type. And it was complicated because the original was in PHP and needed to be in Perl for Movable Type. And I knew Brad. And I started sending Brad and Dean sort of suggestions because they were changing some things. And then Dean said to me, this is very important. It was like a seminal moment. And I knew Dean and he was really, really a fan of Daring Fireball. And I was a huge fan of textism, huge influence on what Daring Fireball still is to this day.

9:06And Dean just wrote back to me and said something to the effect, I have the email somewhere, but it's something to the effect of these are great ideas, but you should just make your own thing. So then I made my own thing. There are like two competing ideas about what Markdown was supposed to be. And one was like, I want to write something where I can easily type all the characters I need in order to make it readable to the computer. And there was another one that was like, I want to make something that is computer language, but that is readable to humans. No, that was an overriding goal. And I think truly differentiated Markdown from everything else in this sphere was not focusing on the authorship and the type ability, even though all the characters are ASCII characters.

9:48And I really thought about it because I'm so Mac-centric and it's easy to type certain characters, like option eight to get a real bullet character. There's a bunch of easily typed Unicode characters that I thought about putting in the syntax. and I was like, no, I should just stick to the ASCII ones. But the readability was more important to me than the writability. That it should be that maybe the overriding goal of it is you should be able to print it out in Markdown format and hand it to somebody who's never heard of Markdown, never used a command line, and they can just read it and they would totally understand what you mean.

10:24That they'd pick that up very quickly. Like, oh, I get it. These are the words you think are italics. The readability was more important. And it was, A, I thought that was missing in all the other ones. And B, it just, it was driven by the fact that the whole reason I wanted to make it is that HTML was so hard to edit, right? And it's like, once I had it written, it's like optimizing for readability. You read something over and over again. You only type the characters once. I think it's one of the most important reasons it took off, right? So to John's point, we'd made this tool, you know, mobile type that was being used by, you know, at that time, Gawker and Huffington Post, like all of the big blogs, right?

11:05And none of those folks liked HTML. So you had like two or three people in the office who were like, they really knew HTML and everybody else was kind of like enduring it. And when we talk about, like literally to put an image in a post, right? So they'd be writing about like, you know, Britney Spears was caught at this club doing this, which was like half the stories on Gawker at the time. And then to put it in an image, they're like, this is miserable. and and then what was really important too was like when they wrote the post in markdown the other person didn't even have to know it was marked down right it was literally what they would have written in an email and like that like they said that explicitly they're like oh this is like normal and like we don't feel like nerds when we see this and so that became the default and and that actually was different than textile like i really i just like john like all of us were such huge fans of dean like he was just one of those super influential early folks that um you know And we were all just kind of in awe of him.

12:02He could do it all right and code and whatever. And so I wanted to be... I did a bunch of posts in textile because I was like, I want to be like Dean. And then I was like, but it doesn't... It just doesn't... It's not how people write. And so I got to see... So I was in charge of people making plugins, basically. And so we were trying to launch... When you make a platform, you want people to make plugins. And we were really the first tool that had plugins. And so it was like a dream to be like, Here's John, and everybody already loved Daring Fireball. Here's John making this thing, and here's Dean making a version of Dean's thing.

12:36And so you're like, what an embarrassment of riches to have these things that people actually want to use. But it was not even close right out of the gate that people were just using Markdown because they could type something that looks like what they were already writing. They were kind of like, I already know this one, or at least I know two-thirds of it. And then they told us explicitly, this works like I work. So, Anil, I do want to know about the John being John part of this, because I went back and found, John, the first post you wrote basically sort of launching Markdown to the world. And it just starts with, I've written a text HTML formatting tool called Markdown, which is now available for download, which gives real like open AI saying chat.

13:14It's a research preview vibes. It's like, hi, I've done this thing that is going to become utterly ubiquitous on the Internet. So here it is. You can have it, I guess. um but anil do you do you remember this as like was this like a seismic moment on the internet like john gruber has made a markup language no but it didn't have to be right so i think it's hard to explain how different like what we used to call the blogosphere like how different blogs were in social media world there like there was a sense that everybody read every blog every day then like that sounds right and like that sounds like an insane thing to say but but i think there was a couple things are different one like people had rss readers so you could kind of keep a track of a lot of stuff and not everybody updated every day.

13:54So you just could see all the updates. It was kind of like, you know, if you had like when everybody, like when Twitter was still Twitter and you could kind of read all the updates from everybody at a time. And, and I think the other thing was there was a, a tool that a researcher named Cameron Marlowe had made called blog decks and, and links would float up to the top when they were popular. And so even if you weren't like, if somebody had not been a regular reader of John's blog, if a bunch of people had linked to his post, it would sort of surface up. And there would only be 10 or 15, maybe 20 links that were popular in a day across all blogs.

14:28And also, I think another thing that's really kind of impossible to imagine, there was not that much going on in tech, right? Like there wasn't like, here's 50 new phones and cameras and whatever launching every day. It was just like the things that normal people made who were like good hackers was the most interesting things going on in tech. And, you know, that was the other reason that you were following what an individual developer was making is it was way cooler. I mean, cause again, like you were talking about, like, what is Yahoo doing? You know, what is Cisco doing? Like there was no way that was cooler than what John was doing.

15:04But the other thing that Neil hit on was that the stuff in tech that was going on was blogging itself. And so that's what we wrote about. And it sounds navel-gazy, but it wasn't because it really was some of the most interesting stuff going on. The spirit of everybody was building building blocks for everybody else, right? And that's very, very different than the environment now. Everything was open. So almost everything everybody was assuming was going to be open source was going to be sort of cloned and copied. I think the only thing that kind of has that feeling these days is maybe like MCP, right?

15:34Where people are building things that are kind of interoperable between each other. And, you know, when we say blogs, like it sounds very sort of like retrograde, but it is a superset of everything we consider social media today. Right. So everything that would be Instagram and everything that would be TikTok and everything that would be WordPress. But like all those things together would all be under this heading. And also when people were building a fundamental component, yeah, it could be Markdown. But also somebody might be inventing podcasting, right, at this time. And somebody might be, you know, inventing like fundamental formats were things that an individual person was capable of creating.

16:07in a way that would spread now to what? Like a billion users, right? So like the kinds of things that sort of, so that thing that like a guy and, you know, John's a remarkable guy, but like a guy can make a thing. And then you could imagine, like, I think we could extrapolate maybe millions of people might use it. I don't think maybe like a billion people are going to use this, but yeah. But you couldn't, it wasn't ridiculous at all to be like, I might make a thing and a couple of million people might use it. And so like that's so unfathomable, I think, in the current era. But it was intuitive at that sense that that might, you know, at that stage that that might happen.

16:44So I think that was that was such a addictive, you know, feeling when you're creating. Yeah. I keep seeing celebrities posts me in the 90s versus now. While the person staring at me in the mirror is definitely not the same person that could pull off bootcut jeans. Time creeps up on us so slowly. You don't see it until suddenly you do. Same thing goes for your bills. A dollar here, an uptick there. It's a slow burn until one day you realize the price you're paying now is way higher than when you signed up. But at T-Mobile, customers had the lowest wireless bills versus Verizon and AT &T over the past five years.

17:21And with T-Mobile on their experience plans, you get a five-year price guarantee, so you know exactly what your plan price will be for the next five years. So at least that's one thing that won't change over time. I can't guarantee you'll still look good with frosted tips, but T-Mobile can give you a clear guarantee on your wireless plan. Lower bills based on Harris X billing snapshots from Q321 to Q425 compared to average AT &T and Verizon bills. Comparison excludes discounts, credits, and optional charges. Price guarantee on talk text and data. Exclusions like taxes and fees apply. See T-Mobile.com.

17:52I'm Seth Matlins. My new show, Create or Destroy Reimagining Marketing, explores how every decision a company makes, Not just the marketing ones, but the HR, IR, pricing, org design, and planning ones. The ones most don't consider marketing at all contribute to either creating value or destroying it. Each week, I sit down with CMOs, CEOs, founders, cultural thinkers, the people building, breaking, and reimagining how businesses grow or don't for conversations about what creates value and what destroys it. It's a business show. It's a marketing show. The creator destroys the show that argues. They've always been the same thing.

18:26from the Vox Media Podcast Network and the Wisdomist Company. New episodes drop weekly on YouTube and your favorite podcast app.

18:39So, okay, so let's jump ahead a bunch here because I think, like, fairly quickly, Markdown becomes sort of ubiquitous. I am curious. I'm going to disagree there. Oh, really? It was a years. It was a slow burn for a while. It actually took off from 2004 to 2010. It was very slow and actually very disappointing to me. Oh, okay. I thought, I'm convinced. I was like, this is the fucking shit. I can't go back. I can't believe more people aren't using this. And then it did, I noticed, it just slowly grew. I have a concrete example. So we did Stack Overflow. I knew the founding team and I was on the board.

19:18And Stack launched in 08, I think. And it was controversial that it supported Markdown, right? Because it was like really, there was a really strong argument. And I think Jeff Atwood, one of the co-founders, had been like, we should do Markdown so they can do fancy formatted answers on, you know, Stack Overflow is the most popular, you know, community for coders to answer each other's questions. A group of people who, in theory, would love to write in Markdown. They're all coders, right? And so, like, they should know this thing and it's really easy and they might want to use HTML in their answers and all these kinds of things.

19:47So it seemed like a straight down the middle suggestion. And still, there was a lot of debate. Well, are people going to know? Are they going to do too much HTML? All these kinds of things. And of course, it ended up being wildly popular. People use it all the time. But it was still a controversial thing. And then I think GitHub was the year after. And it was also the same thing where it was not a gimme that they were going to do it. And then, of course, both of those sites ended up adding other flavors or whatever extensions to it. GitHub was a huge one. It was like a step change. And because they kind of said, hey, if you're using GitHub and you're going to write something in text, it's going to be in GitHub flavored markdown and whether you like it or not.

20:29And they didn't really ask opinions. And then that kind of forced the technical minded people who I think just basically had the mindset of, I know HTML. I don't need a baby language in front of HTML. Right. And they don't. Right. I didn't either. It's not that you need it. It's that once you start using it, you're not going to want to go back. It really is one of those things where you have to use it for a while before you see the appeal. Whereas before you use it and you see this is the markdown and this is the HTML that it will generate, you're like, yeah, I get it, but I don't need that. I could just write the HTML.

21:03But then you start using it and you're like, oh, I can never go back. And that's what GitHub kind of did. And it made it put it in the heads of technical people. And then they became the what do you call it? The evangelists for it. Yeah. So, but John, that turn you just described where the technical people get into it, start using it, love it, and become the evangelists takes a really sort of weird, unexpected turn. And I think I went back and found a blog post you wrote almost exactly a year ago when Apple Notes got Markdown support. And this, I think, one of the questions I was going to ask you is like, what is the moment where you're like, you know, hey, look, I made it.

21:42Like we did. I feel like, I don't know how you beat Apple Notes now lets you write in Markdown for your particular. It doesn't really let you write in Markdown. And I don't think it should. That's the thing. I'm now, I've gone from, there's like the three stages of Markdown. For me, the creator of Markdown is this, there's a third of its life at this point where I really felt like it wasn't popular enough. Then there's the middle third where I'm like, ah, finally, it's like the people who should be using Markdown are using it. And it's in the places where it should be available. This is great.

22:12But the last third of its life has been the, I'm like, where's the break? This is too much. This is being exposed to people who should have a WYSIWYG thing in front of them. Yeah. Okay. So that, this is, this is what I'm getting at. And I think maybe Google docs is a cleaner example of like, you can, you can write a Google doc in Markdown now. It's weird and bad, and I don't suggest doing it, but you can do it. But simultaneously, this thing has happened where a bunch of, a bunch of companies have said, rather than pure WYSIWYG, like you, you, you, you press the button to make it bold. We're going to let you do the carrots to make it, or we're going to let you do the asterisk to make it bold.

22:49but also Markdown Editor has become a thing. And there was this whole slew of new text editing documents where it was like, actually, the whole point is to expose the formatting structure in front of people. And I sort of see the idea behind that. Like I use Obsidian, which is one of the better known Markdown Editors for everything. And their whole idea is this stuff should be readable by lots of apps. We want to build files that aren't proprietary. Like I get all of it. I feel like there's something about that that would drive you in particular just completely insane. That like, this is just not what Markdown was supposed to be.

23:24Yeah, basically. I mean, I like it. And there's a fine line between it, right? And for example, when I made Markdown, there was no syntax coloring for it, right? It was meant to be self-evident in a text editor with no syntax coloring, just the asterisks and the brackets and the braces. They all speak for themselves. and it still kind of does work that way. But then with syntax coloring, it's a little better. And with syntax styling, it's even better. Like it's nice when your editor actually does italicize the text between the asterisks. It's nice. But it still is a monospaced font and you delete the asterisks and it deletes the italics.