| markdown was _released_ 10 years ago, that's true. but it's not entirely accurate to say it was "invented". let me be more clear: markdown was _not_ "invented". gruber was blogging with movable type, which was using
the _textile_ light-markup system created by dean allen. so he didn't even come up with the _idea_ himself! of course, neither did allen. light-markup systems
were _the_zeitgeist_ around the turn of the century: * restructured-text was adopted for python documentation. (.rst -wikipedia.org/wiki/restructuredtext -- david goodger) * asciidoc had a big list of org-users. (still does.) (asciidoc -- wikipedia.org/wiki/asciidoc -- stuart rackham) * and there were other early entrants that are still alive. (txt2tags -- wikipedia.org/wiki/txt2tags -- txt2tags team) and dean allen's textile had a fairly solid reach by 2004: * textile -- wikipedia.org/wiki/textpattern -- dean allen * texy -- code.google.com/p/texy-- david grudl * redcloth -- rubygems.org/gems/RedCloth/versions -- garber * textpattern -- textpattern.com -- dean allen but the first that i'd call "light markup" was "setext": * 1992 -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/setext -- ian feldman "setext" was short for "structured e-text", and yes, that's
why "restructured-text" put the "re" in front of its name,
because they were "redoing" the structured-e-text of setext. but even ian feldman would tell you (if you could find him)
that he was merely leveraging the well-known conventions of
the fledging internet at the time, such as usenet listserves. "light-markup" is something that _the_masses_ "invented". -bowerbird |