John Gruber

Yes, from the company that made Movable Type, did the textile plug-in for Movable Type.

And it was complicated because the original was in PHP and needed to be in Perl for Movable Type.

And I knew Brad.

And I started sending Brad and Dean sort of suggestions because they were changing some things.

And then Dean said to me, this is very important.

It was like a seminal moment.

And I knew Dean and he was really, really a fan of Daring Fireball.

And I was a huge fan of textism, huge influence on what Daring Fireball still is to this day.

And Dean just wrote back to me and said something to the effect.

I have the email somewhere, but it's something to the effect of these are great ideas, but you should just make your own thing.

So then I made my own thing.

No, that was an overriding goal.

I think truly differentiated Markdown from everything else in the sphere was not focusing on the authorship and the typability,

even though all the characters are ASCII characters, there's, you know, and I really thought about it cause I'm so Mac centric and it's easy to type, you know, certain characters like option eight to get a real bullet character.

There's a bunch of easily typed Unicode characters that I thought about putting in the syntax.

Um, and I was like, nah, I should just stick to the ASCII ones.

But the readability was more important to me than the writeability that it should be that one,

Maybe the overriding goal of it is you should be able to print it out in Markdown format and hand it to somebody who's never heard of Markdown, never used a command line, and they can just read it and they would totally understand what you mean.

They'd pick that up very quickly.

Like, oh, I get it.