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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Here's a fun trick: if you add .text to any URL on Markdown creator John Gruber's blog you'll get to see the hand-authored (bar the metadata and tags bits) Markdown he wrote for that entry.

Example: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/01/09/moylan.text

... and if you look closely at some of the entries you might spot custom Markdown features that aren't part of the published spec.

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Funny that he didn't use the .md extension. Maybe because he started doing it before he expected his markup would merit its own filetype?

"Too late now, I suppose, but the only file extension I would endorse is “.markdown” [...]

(I personally use “.text” for my own files, and have BBEdit set to use Markdown syntax coloring for that extension, which is why I never saw a need to endorse an official extension.)"

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/01/08/markdown-extens...

Thanks for finding this post. I did a quick search for it and came up empty.

More likely because the whole point of Markdown was to be embedded in text, not a freestanding format for an entire document.

This is exactly why.

It is my assumption that Gruber chose ‘.text’ over ‘.txt’ for several reasons. To give it a little difference when searching for files. To be more legible to non-computer people. And finally, while Classic MacOS did not use file extensions, the Resource Fork type code for text files was ‘TEXT’

Also a little extra distinction: “.txt” is a relic of 8.3 DOS filename conventions. He was not bound by these. If you’ve got the space, of course you’ll go with “.text” over “.txt” because text is the input, HTML is the output, Markdown is the tool for converting one into the other, per the first line of the introduction:

> Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers.

Ergo they’re not Markdown documents, they’re text files that can be converted into HTML using Markdown.

https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

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