Gruber and Anil Dash on the epic story of Markdown
Daring Fireball · John Gruber · June 17, 2026 · source ↗
John Gruber joined The Vergecast with Anil Dash to tell the origin story of Markdown — the 2002 bet on Apple and blogs, Textile as inspiration, and Aaron Swartz as the format’s most valuable beta tester.
What makes this more than nostalgia is Markdown’s second act. I write nearly everything in it — notes, specs, the signaling and identity work I do day to day, and now the constant back-and-forth with AI tools, which both emit it and expect it. There’s something fitting about a syntax designed to read cleanly as plain text for humans becoming the way we hand structure to machines: the same property that made it pleasant to write is what makes it legible to a model.
The twist is that AI may end up hiding it. As tools convert Markdown to rich HTML on the way to the screen, the format people actually touch could drift away from the raw syntax — but Markdown looks set to persist underneath as the canonical interchange format, the thing everything serializes to and from. A long life for a format that started as one person’s itch.