Aaron Swartz and John Gruber announce the creation of Markdown, a lightweight markup language designed to make writing web content as easy as writing email. The project includes both a Perl implementation for converting Markdown to HTML and an alpha version of html2text for reverse conversion. Both tools are released as free software under GNU GPL.
Background
Before Markdown, writing web content required knowledge of HTML, which created barriers for non-technical users. Lightweight markup languages emerged to simplify content creation for blogs and websites.
- Source
- Lobsters
- Published
- Apr 22, 2026 at 08:51 PM
- Score
- 9.0 / 10