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Comment by slightwinder | Hacker News Reader

> It didn't start when it was named and mapped to HTML. It was in use on usenet and in emails before HTML even existed. And most of its conventions came from typewriters before that.

It used established syntax, but it didn't start there. There are also other markup-languages, which use other established syntax from the old times. A language is not just some random parts.

> You could print out a Markdown document today and jump in a time machine to 1970 and hand it to someone and they'd understand it.

Because it's human-friendly by design, not because it's syntax already existed back then. There are limits to what people would understand in 1970 from the syntax.

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> There are also other markup-languages, which use other established syntax from the old times.

Would you care to share some examples? I'm genuinely interested, while nothing obvious that would fit this description comes to my mind.

AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, textile, org-mode, they all have to some degree such syntax. Or just read old usenet-archives, FAQs and such. It's natural to do it if your aim is to be lightweight and readable. You just happen to use the elements you have at hand. And people did that, wrote all kind of texts and documents in ascii with made-up syntax on the spot, for usenet, e-mail, ftp-servers, etc. It's hard to say that something started here or there, if the path to it is so short.

Ah, I thought we're talking typewriter-old times. Yes, sure, I do remember the proliferation of weird wiki syntaxes, and I also remember seeing markdown as a breath of fresh air in its readability and intuitiveness. I do believe the same as the poster before me, that markdown is the closest among them to what could be seen either in typewriting, or on usenet. Asciidoc and rst have some of it, but break the illusion by introducing too much weirdness (see esp. the syntax for links and lists in both of them). Until proven otherwise, I can't believe those happening on usenet and not being ridiculed.

I would argue that rst is much closer to how things were done with typewriters. One example: I can not think of one document written on a typewriter that indicated a heading with #, but just a brief search for typewriter document images will get you ones with "--" underlines as headings. For me that is actually still the biggest difference between rst and Markdown, and I still think underlines look much more like headings, but I also find # much easier to write

Remember that Markdown supports both SETEXT (# header, ## header, ### header) and ATX (header\n======, header\n------) headers. I prefer SETEXT headers for writing since you can use all the supported hX levels, but if all you need is h1 and h2, then ATX headers are usable.

More generally, markdown is but one (if the most successful) of the “lightweight markup languages” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language).

Most of them have fallen into disuse following the ascendency of markdown, but anyone who was on the internet in the mid-aughts will remember textile and creole, they were major contenders in the CMS and wiki space respectively (IIRC).

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