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Comment by jolux | Hacker News Reader

Is Markdown really "relatively new?" According to Wikipedia, it's older than OOXML, aka .docx .xlsx .pptx etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML

Relative to widespread brand recognition, I guess, and relative to similar initiatives. But indeed, Markdown — as in, the concept of _lightweight markup_ — predates the Web and is at least as old as Usenet. I footnote 9, I linked to my Github repo with Markdown resources; there you’ll find the following chronology:

- Setext (Ian Feldman, 1992) - AFT (Todd Coram, 1999) - Grutatxt (Ángel Ortega, 2000) - atx (Aaron Swartz, 2002) - AsciiDoc (Stuart Rackham, 2002) - MediaWiki (Magnus Manske & Lee Daniel Crocker, 2002) - reStructuredText (David Goodger, 2002) - Org-mode (Carsten Dominik, 2003) - Textile (Dean Allen, 2004) - Markdown (John Gruber & Aaron Swartz, 2004)

Yes, I'm quite aware of the history, which is why I thought it was strange that you referred to it as "relatively new." Otherwise, it's a great post.

Thanks! And yeah, if people would only know their history… Relatively new, to me, unfortunately, means that lightweight markup still is not something which the broader public is familiar with, not even by its proxy brandname “Markdown”, even with big outlets (e.g. Reddit) pushing it forward.

It's been around since 2004, but only really gained momentum when the iPhone app store came out. Since you couldn't have styled text, people would use apps that supported Markdown on their iPhone and once processed, see it styled.

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