[ionfish]

Creating—or discovering, if you prefer—Markdown and JSON were not great feats of technical accomplishment. They are, however, considerable achievements in data format design. In their respective domains, they provide best-of-breed formats with simple rules [1] that anyone can master in a few minutes.

One of the key insights shared by both formats is the very thing that make people wary about touting them as serious creative accomplishments: they build, very explicitly, on existing user conventions. Markdown was based on the emphases and accents used in email; JSON was based on JavaScript's object notation. They appear obvious because we already know the rules.

[1] Simple for humans, anyway; Markdown isn't straightforward to parse, because of all the edge cases.