How Markdown took over the world

Nearly every bit of the high-tech world, from the most cutting-edge AI systems at the biggest companies, to the casual scraps of code cobbled together by college students, is annotated and described by the same, simple plain text format. Whether you’re trying to give complex instructions to…

https://anildash.com/2026/01/09/how-markdown-took-over-the-world/

• we changed the size of the box that people used to type in just to create the posts on their sites. We made the box a little bit taller, mostly for aesthetic reasons. Within a few weeks, we’d found that posts on sites like Gawker had gotten longer, mostly because the box was bigger.

• But it’s important for everyone to know that the Internet, and the tech industry, don’t run without the generosity and genius of regular people.

• The most surprising part of what happened next wasn’t that everybody immediately started using it to write their blogs; that was, after all, what the tool was designed to do. It’s that everybody started using Markdown to do everything else, too.

• On GitHub, the platform that nearly every developer in the world uses to share their code, nearly every single repository of code on the site has at least one Markdown file that’s used to describe its contents.

• It’s almost impossible to overstate the ubiquity of Markdown within the modern computer industry in the decades since its launch.