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Comment by bfung | Hacker News Reader

> Maybe I don’t know much about Markdown…

Says the inventor of it, 20yrs ago. https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

Inventing a thing and understanding a thing aren't necessarily the same. We adopt technologies and make them our own, sometimes away from the inventor's initial vision.

I think if people, by and large, enjoy markdown one way (for example in this forum, where you italicize text but the control characters don't show), then maybe the inventor is wrong. Or is right about their preferences but shouldn't try to make their preferences the de facto standard.

The best example of that is Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, predicting the collapse of Ethernet... didn't happen.

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/azevs3/til_t...

https://web.archive.org/web/20061107120353/http://www.merit....

> Of course you should understand that I ate the column only because the Internet, as far as I can tell, did not suffer a gigalapse during 1996 -- a billion lost user*hours in a single outage. The Internet has indeed bogged down (hit STOP much?) and has indeed suffered large outages (the biggest being a 118 megalapse at AOL in August)

He was only wrong by a factor of 9.

I think the author of the blog post intended the comment as a tongue-in-cheek joke; A humble way of pointing out that they created markdown and thus have some degree of implicit authority when speaking on the subject.

Yes, I understood that. My point is that they specifically don't have implicit authority.

I think he understands it pretty well. Implicitly, explicitly, however you like. It’s a PERL script that has been reimplemented a hundred different ways. “Read” in this instance means as a writer reviewing his own writing, not as the final output.

You can pull up any individual Daring Fireball article and append .text to the URL to read the Markdown source, but you don’t necessarily want to read Daring Fireball (or anything) like that.

Similarly, I think Markdown gets misused in a lot of places it doesn’t really belong. It’s handy, sure, but there’s also nothing wrong with just making a good WYSIWIG editor for people rather than telling them they have to use Markdown. That’s just my opinion, but Gruber has expressed similar opinions elsewhere.

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