John Gruber

Anil, what do you think of that?

No, but I don't think it should be required, right?

And the thing that I'm proudest of, and the thing that I think I've been proven right about, and it skips over some controversy in the middle, is I've never seen it.

I'm the creator of what I would consider the canonical Markdown, or I don't know what you want to call it.

but like the official, and I don't, I stopped dicking around with it.

I don't add new features.

I'm not saying I never will, but I haven't in decades.

The, I think a lot of other people, if they saw it as a more of a technical thing, they would have been offended by all the various flavors that came out.

But I have always been of the opinion, let a thousand markdowns bloom.

And that it's not a syntax or a language per se, but a convention for writing plain text.

It's taking the, you know, plain text is the technical standard.

And there were a bunch of conventions.

And the thing that I'm happiest about isn't that Markdown particularly is so popular.

It's that the various hundred different ways of italicizing something in plain text.

I had strong opinions about those since like the early 90s.

And I thought everybody should do it my way and use the asterisks.

And then I thought the second best way is the underscores.

But all the other ways, people would use the tildes for that.

People would use slashes for italics.

And I'm like, I wish people would do it my way.