Anil Dash: How Markdown Took Over the World:

As hard as it may be to believe, back in 2004, the default was that people made new standards for open technologies like Markdown, and just shared them freely for the good of the internet, and the world, and then went on about their lives. If it happened to have unleashed billions of dollars of value for others, then so much the better. If they got some credit along the way, that was great, too. But mostly you just did it to solve a problem for yourself and for other like-minded people. And also, maybe, to help make sure that some jerk didn’t otherwise create some horrible proprietary alternative that would lock everybody into their terrible inferior version forever instead.

A great essay by Dash, about everyone's favorite plain text format and the why and how of the times.

I love Markdown. All of Acorn's documentation is in written in Markdown, and the same with Retrobatch's. All my notes these days are in Markdown too.

Like many things that we come to rely on, Markdown was probably inevitable. However we could have ended up with something that absolutely sucked, but we didn't, and we have John Gruber's good taste to thank for that.