| > since nobody is meant to actually _read_ raw markdown, i've never understood why everyone cites that passage so religiously, other than that is part of the origin story mythology. Because that's not a universal feel, and some people do read it. I write a subset of markdown normally in text. I use asterisks for bold, use a hash for section headings, and use unordered and ordered lists as defined. I value that I write the same thing, and sometimes it's just text and sometimes it gets prettified, and I really don't need to care the majority of the time whether it does or not, because for the most part people understand the conventions used in the plain text. Here's the kicker, in one job I designed a system to send email to customers that took advantage of this, and if you supplied a text message to email and the markdown version was different, automatically generated a multi-part email with the plain text part being the markdown, and the HTML part being the generated output from the markdown. > due mostly to netnewswire, which installed gruber as its default mac-blogger, gruber's reach was phenomenal when blogging first went viral. if you don't understand the power of that reach at that time, it's probably because you weren't around. and that group of "cool internet kids" still flaunts itself, most notably recently in the nearly-immediate widespread uptake of json-feed. I think you vastly overestimate the pull Gruber had over the general people at that time. I didn't know anything about him, but it wasn't because I wasn't around, I was already working in the industry. It was because I didn't have anything to do with Apple products and didn't care. Which is the same for most people. We're talking about three years pre-iphone here. Before the unibody macbook. Apple's core product that was tapping a wider audience was the iPod. If you weren't following Apple as a customer and fan, chances are you didn't know or care who Gruber was. I certainly didn't. But Gruber wasn't the only author. Arron Schwartz invented it with him, and Aaron Schwartz was helping out an early Reddit a year later. Again, I think you vastly overestimate Gruber's role over actual use in popular sites, such as Reddit, and later Stack Overflow. > well, that coupled with the fact that markdown has a catchy name. one cannot deny that. that helped too. I won't deny that at all! I think that probably has more to do with it than Gruber's advocacy as well. :) > at any rate, kbenson, i'm off to a school reunion Enjoy! I've got another year before I have my 20th. > we've hit the point of severely diminished returns anyway. Agreed. We're really just refining our prior points but not making any headway in persuading each other. |
my only note now is that i was never trying to "persuade" you. or anyone else. think whatever you like, wrong or right.