Markdown was created by developer John Gruber in 2004. Its name is a playful twist on “markup” because its original purpose was to be a faster, easier way to generate HTML, a “markup” language. The original utility was written in Perl.

I became familiar with John Gruber and his Daring Fireball blog around 2006 or 2007 when I bought my first Macintosh, a Mac Mini. Annoyed by the criticism of Windows Vista and swayed by Apple’s fantastic “Get a Mac” campaign with Justin Long and John Hodgman, I would not purchase another Windows laptop until my wife needed one. Windows 8. Yeah, that was better. Sigh. If you’re not familiar with his blog, John Gruber is to the Apple ecosystem what Stephen Few is to analytics and data visualization- a curmudgeon with a colorful writing style and a sense of humor.

I started learning Markdown last year when I created my own GitHub account, as Markdown is GitHub’s choice for documentation. My thinking was two-fold. First, GitHub would be useful if I created any scripts that I wanted to share with the world. Second, SAP replaced Subversion with Git as the version control mechanism in SAP BusinessObjects BI 2025 (see SAP KB 3581196 – Subversion is no longer packaged in BI 2025 as a Version Management repository). It’s a sign of SAP’s larger move toward open tooling, CI/CD pipelines, and DevOps practices across its product lines.

Markdown has become so ubiquitous that Microsoft purchased GitHub in 2008 for US $7.5B. And last year, Microsoft officially announced Markdown support for humble Notepad on May 30, 2025, via the Windows Insider Blog as part of a “lightweight formatting” update. And it is improving that support with updates rolling out this year.

Markdown History

Markdown has a colorful history. Kudos to HackMD and Web2MD for including history pages—their products were completely new to me until those pages pulled me in. Note to marketing teams everywhere: that’s a clever strategy.

HackMD

HackMD is a collaborative workspace for Markdown and published The History of Markdown: How Plain Text Took Over.

Web2MD

Web2MD is a service that converts any webpage to “clean, AI-friendly Markdown” and published its own history of Markdown entitled “A Brief History of Markdown: From Email Conventions to AI’s Native Language“.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia has a page devoted to Markdown and it is worth reading.

Markdown References

Markdown isn’t difficult to learn, but here are some references to get you started.

CommonMark

CommonMark is a specification for Markdown. Their site includes a handy reference guide.

GitHub

GitHub supports Markdown for documentation and is probably the service most responsible for spreading the ubiquity of Markdown. Check out their Markdown tutorial.

YouTube

YouTube supports its own Markdown-ish, uh, markup for video descriptions, but it isn’t Markdown.

I’ll be sharing more about SAP BusinessObjects and Git in the near future. Do you use Markdown? Share your Markdown or Daring Fireball stories in the comments below.