Markdown’s popularity seems to stem from its simplicity. Complicating the base standard may hurt more than help, as tools that only need the basics (what it was designed for) would be pressured into full support of a complex standard.
It’s one thing for an app to create scope creep for markdown that those users can leverage. It’s another thing for the standard to create the scope creep, which is then pushed onto all the apps that may use it.
At some point, markdown loses its human readability when too many features are added. So if it gets too complicated, someone will inevitably create a new more simple standard… or push something like “markdown classic”.
John Gruber, who created markdown, doesn’t even use it for all the stuff most others do today.
It will expand like JavaScript from its origins. It is now in its early period, like JS was before its standardization. It will become some sort of natural language source file format with fuzzy typing (vs HTML≈XML/JSON for structured document file format, JS for formal executable language source file).
I'm quite happy with Markdown. It powers the website I live from. I like that it's human-readable, supported by so many editors, and generally easy to work with.
I have made a few extensions to make my life easier:
- Constants like {{ current_year}} to set things in one place and repeat them in multiple places
- Custom elements like {% tableOfContents %}. I just use Jinja inside markdown.
Agreed. IDs feel like the right starting point — names before verbs.
From there, I could imagine thin protocol layers emerging above — renderers, voice interfaces, AI agents each binding their own behavior to the same IDs. Markdown stays plain text. Complexity through composition, not bloat.
I chose markdown as main format for gethly.com but i needed to extend it with various features/widgets. This is where I found its limitations because i essentially ended up doing the same pattern with ::: block pattern, which you can see on the help page here https://gethly.com/page/markdown
Additionally, I have added attributes with {} for images. Overall, my impression was that BB Code might be better for extensibility of the format, despite it being essentially just a different format for raw html. MD is not perfect by any means and is essentially limited by the amount of available human-friendly characters/patterns that you can type. But it is still convenient and easy for most people. Hence, the simplicity implies there is no replacement as it is already simple enough.
Markdown’s popularity seems to stem from its simplicity. Complicating the base standard may hurt more than help, as tools that only need the basics (what it was designed for) would be pressured into full support of a complex standard.
It’s one thing for an app to create scope creep for markdown that those users can leverage. It’s another thing for the standard to create the scope creep, which is then pushed onto all the apps that may use it.
At some point, markdown loses its human readability when too many features are added. So if it gets too complicated, someone will inevitably create a new more simple standard… or push something like “markdown classic”.
John Gruber, who created markdown, doesn’t even use it for all the stuff most others do today.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/04/apple-notes-mar...
It will expand like JavaScript from its origins. It is now in its early period, like JS was before its standardization. It will become some sort of natural language source file format with fuzzy typing (vs HTML≈XML/JSON for structured document file format, JS for formal executable language source file).
I'm quite happy with Markdown. It powers the website I live from. I like that it's human-readable, supported by so many editors, and generally easy to work with.
I have made a few extensions to make my life easier:
- Constants like {{ current_year}} to set things in one place and repeat them in multiple places
- Custom elements like {% tableOfContents %}. I just use Jinja inside markdown.
That has served me well for 5 years or so.
The "Unified" ecosystem represents an alternative evolutionary direction for markdown:
Markdown → remark → mdast
mdast → remark-rehype → hast
hast → rehype → HTML
It's powerful enough for me to integrate plugins into markdown.
If markdown allowed class and id identifiers on each content description it would be sufficient to replace HTML.
Agreed. IDs feel like the right starting point — names before verbs.
From there, I could imagine thin protocol layers emerging above — renderers, voice interfaces, AI agents each binding their own behavior to the same IDs. Markdown stays plain text. Complexity through composition, not bloat.
something made based on markdown - https://voiden.md
Markdown + strict extension profiles is probably the next step.
I chose markdown as main format for gethly.com but i needed to extend it with various features/widgets. This is where I found its limitations because i essentially ended up doing the same pattern with ::: block pattern, which you can see on the help page here https://gethly.com/page/markdown
Additionally, I have added attributes with {} for images. Overall, my impression was that BB Code might be better for extensibility of the format, despite it being essentially just a different format for raw html. MD is not perfect by any means and is essentially limited by the amount of available human-friendly characters/patterns that you can type. But it is still convenient and easy for most people. Hence, the simplicity implies there is no replacement as it is already simple enough.
skynet
The Matrix got me into programming, so honestly this was inevitable.