Popularity ≠ superiority. Proprietary text document formats is yet another proof of Microsoft’s crookedness—their subpar products only able to stay afloat by unethical anti-competitive behaviour.
I think the main reason why Word is losing mindshare, is because it was designed for paper. The whole formatting system makes the assumption that there’s a fixed width and height into which your text and images fit. In reality, a phone screen is a lot narrower and a widescreen monitor a lot wider.
Markdown never made these assumptions. For the most part simply because plain text reflows to fill whatever space you give it. But there’s no way to position an image either, I imagine mostly for simplicity’s sake. It can look goofy at times, but it never looks broken.
That’s why I can write this comment on my phone and someone else can look at it on desktop and it’s perfectly readable in both scenarios.You are also describing markup.
You can see that M$ staunchly opposes it as they never allow it in any of their tools. The only one that they’ve used is the * to make bulleted lists. I hope that it is the death of their software as open source alternatives slowly strip away their shoddy and ill-equiped tools.
@browncoat1
As open source software, LibreOffice or OpenOffice can now do more than MS Office or Office 356 or whatever it’s called. I was able to import all Word documents and save them as *.docx files. Or import PDF forms; it works. Sometimes something gets stuck somewhere, and then the community or the support team helps. Sometimes just a workaround and it works again.
The author would do well to look up SGML; Markdown is fundamentally about sugaring the syntax for tag-oriented markup and is defined as a superset of HTML, so mistaking it for something like TeX or Word really demonstrates a failure to engage with Markdown per se. I suppose that the author can be forgiven somewhat, considering that they are talking to writers, but it’s yet another example of how writers really only do research up to the point where they can emit a plausible article and get paid.
It’s worth noting that Microsoft bought PowerPoint, GitHub, LinkedIn, and many other things—but it did in fact create Word and Excel. Microsoft is, in essence, a sales company. It’s not too great at designing software.
So close to a real insight! The correct lesson is that Microsoft, like Blizzard, is skilled at imitating what’s popular in the market; like magpies, they don’t need to have a culture of software design as long as they have a culture of software sales. In particular, Microsoft didn’t create Word or Excel, but ripped off WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.
To be a bit more charitable, my reading of this article was not that Markdown is being mistaken for something like Word or TeX, but that Word is being mistaken as necessary or even desired for a lot of what it’s used for when basic markup will do the job just fine.
Yup. Even for technical writing, markdown with embedded LaTeX is great in most cases, thanks largely to Pandoc and its ability to convert the markdown into pure LaTeX. There are even manuscript-focused Markdown editors, like Zettlr.
I think that’s the closer understanding
The only times I don’t use markdown, I use org-mode
The focus on Microsoft is odd. I remember most people using WordPerfect for DOS and other non-WYSIWYG word processors up until around 1993. These were much better for focusing on writing. MS Word came from behind and started to take over as Windows 3.1 became standard, and then Windows 95. Word wasn’t the best word processor back then and was very buggy, but Microsoft succeeded in marketing it as a natural companion for Windows and bundling it with Excel and PowerPoint, and WordPerfect was slower to move to WYSIWYG.
The rise of the web was also happening at that time, and this article doesn’t give it enough attention as a major influence on document format and a motivation behind markdown.
Honestly, this is a pretty badly written and researched article for someone that likes writing so much.
Like, just the opening two paragraphs about Microsoft controlling document formats … They repeat the same information in both paragraphs and give a rather incomplete history of document formatting.
It’s also wild to write that many words about Markdown and never discuss its connection to HTML and its foundation in formatting via declarative intent rather than imperative formatting instructions (i.e. in markdown you dont style your title by saying
bold / underling / font-size:20, you declare your true intent which isthis is the top level title / heading, but that all comes from the underlying structure of HTML which markdown is basically just a simplification of.In Markdown and HTML and TeX and even Microsoft Word you’re supposed to just use the Heading 1 style option instead of manually changing the style of the paragraph text. There are times when you don’t want to use Word, most commonly because you’re managing your documents as text files in a source code management system or because you’re an LLM and you’re incapable of anything besides Unicode text, and it has some limitations that make it unsuitable for typesetting, but it’s not bad for word processing, and the file types aren’t that terrible to work with anymore. People just don’t know how to use it.
Some of this is the fault of the design of Word. Even modern versions have direct formatting in the Home tab, to the left (chronologically “before” for people used to left-to-right paradigms) of the styles box. The styles box itself becomes rapidly less accessible if the window is not full sized.
If they moved direct formatting to a formatting tab, had a more focused concept of styles, and possibly repurposed some of the direct formatting buttons for quick style application, people would use them a lot more reliably without any training.
I’m less hopeful. People would just switch to the formatting tab and use that. Most people center text on a title page by repeatedly hitting the enter key to go down and then the space key to go right and then they get to the next page by pressing the enter key until they get to the first line of the next page like they’re using a typewritter.
I wouldn’t describe it as “bad”, but because of repetitiveness and vagueness I’d say it’s a draft that could’ve used a couple of re-reads by the author. It sells well because it’s rightfully so dumping on Microsoft.
It’s not even particularly accurate or nuanced in its history of Microsoft’s actions and the doc formats, it doesn’t mention any competitors, it doesn’t mention anything about the history of type setting generally or more advanced projects like LaTex, and at a fundamental level, it’s edited worse than my first year essays.
It spends like 2000 words just to say markdown good because it focuses on intent rather than a particular style.
Yes, I would describe it as bad.
Hmm okay, fair enough.
I use markdown for pretty much everything, and I agree with the overall notion of this rundown, but —
Seeing weird characters when you copy-paste from AI? That’s because ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and others use Markdown to format their responses.
Yeah, maybe that’s not the gotcha the author thought it would be.
Markdown — so stupid simple even stochastic parrots can figure it out is a slogan that will age like milk.
Keeping in mind it’s an advertorial for their apps…
Not sure what they mean by “weird characters”, but chatbots add zero-width Unicode characters as a watermarking mechanism, and LLMs output their own tags to mark different sections.
(the “stochastic parrots” expression is already a contradiction, but whatever)
And another great thing about Markdown: if the system doesn’t “support” it, it’s still totally readable. The formatting doesn’t get in the way of readability.
While true, doesn’t have anything to do with my comment?
Markdown was created in 2004 by John Gruber.
“LOL”, I guess?
Hans Gruber is the antagonist in Die Hard
Hans was the name of one of the German characters in my elementary summer camp fire theater show in which the Americas would call out random German names to get them to stand and shoot them in a World War Two reenactment
This is actually a Monty Python sketch that originally plays in the first world war.
Glad it could be revived 100 years later :) didn’t know they were playing Monthy Python that early
Hans what the fuck did I just read?
