Hacker News Reader

Comment by AuthorizedCust | Hacker News Reader

Huh? Markdown was created in 2004: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown

The tools you invoke, which predate Markdown considerably, and mentioning 1970s don’t make sense in that light.

Anecdotal, but I was using many of the same formatting conventions on early IM and message board platforms in the late 90s/early 00s, even when they didn't actually do any formatting in the program. That's long before the introduction of Markdown. Markdown was an attempt to take all of those community-accepted formatting conventions and standardize it into a single format. If I still had access to any of my messages from those plaintext messaging days and fed them through a Markdown renderer, they would look remarkably similar to what I had meant to say at the time.

Anecdotal to the second degree: my mom saw me typing in the format at the time and remarked that she had learned to use similar formatting when she learned the typewriter in the 70s (coincidentally, she taught me to type on that very same typewriter).

Is it identical to what it was in the 70s? I don't know for sure, but I doubt it. Is it similar enough that someone versed in Markdown can read the 70s typewriter formats and vice versa? Most likely.

Those ways of styling were firmly enough established that a lot of people thought Markdown was violating them by having asterisks render as italic instead of bold. Italic was represented with slashes!

Emacs' Org mode gets this right.

You write:

> Huh? Markdown was created in 2004 …

Did you read OP?

> > It didn't start when it was named and mapped to HTML.

Markdown is a formalisation of conventions which were in common in email & news long before HTML even existed.

Yes, but the point of Markdown is mapping those conventions to HTML. The mapping was the new thing that made it Markdown.

I think the point may have been more that conventions like asterisks or dashes for bulleted lists, angle brackets for quoting, etc. were already heavily used conventions predating markdown, the specification.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com