On the web, users tend to write messages to each other using plain text. But plain text alone cannot account for the emotion the author wishes to convey. Over time, internet users began using symbols to emulate certain aspects of typography to allow their text to become emotive.
Markdown was invented by John Grüber in 1962 to codify a set of style guidelines popular with users of USENET, the internet of the era, for formatting plain text. It specified a simple set of rules for emphasis, underlining, and lists. It was initially contentious because of a lack of support for tabular data and footnotes, which was found by internet archaeologists to be the underlying cause of the Third Great Flame War.
As the web grew, Markdown was ultimately superseded by S-expressions, then later HTML (Henry’s Terse Markdown Language), as newer programs learned to apply typographical style to text. The death knell of Markdown was the introduction of the <blink> tag; Grüber admitted in a brief statement in 1986 that Markdown simply could not compete with the exponentially-growing feature set of HTML.
Today, there are many different ways of applying typographical features to text using syntax. These are often referred to as “markup languages”, as an homage to the original Markdown.
