At Sanity.io, we spend most of our days thinking about how content as data unlocks a lot of value, and we spend a lot of time thinking deeply about editor experiences, and how to save people time, and make working with digital content delightful. Of course, this stance is influenced by working for a platform for structured content. Markdown holds editorial experience back.Markdown wasn’t designed to meet today’s needs of content.
While Markdown is still fine for some things, I don’t believe it’s should be the go-to for content anymore. But since its introduction, the world of digital content has also changed. Markdown is a signifier for the developer and text-tinkerer culture. That’s almost 20 years ago - yikes! What started as a more writer- and reader-friendly syntax for HTML has become a darling for how to write and store technical prose for programmers and tech-savvy people. Markdown’s syntax is intended for one purpose: to be used as a format for writing for the web. Looking back, I remember starting typing in Markdown not long after John Gruber released his first Perl-based parser back in 2004 after collaborating on the language with Aaron Swartz. Markdown is second nature for many of us. In this article, Knut shares his advice against Markdown by looking back on why it was introduced in the first place, and by going through some of the major developments of content on the web. However, it’s important to look at emerging content formats that try to encompass modern needs. Markdown in all its flavors, interpretations, and forks won’t go away.