27 february 2026
For Markdown
I have read an interesting blog article called Against Markdown today and must say that I have many thoughts about it, that I want to jot down here before I might send an feedback mail to the author. I strongly advise any reader of this blog-entry to first read the mentioned article first before this blog-entry.
To clarify some of my points will this blog-entry written after in a markdown style that tries to extremely similar to the style that John Gruber uses on his page for the markdown project.
Markdown is for writers
The first problem that I had with the article was, what seems to me, the missing knowledge of the author, that markdown was explicitly designed for web writers as John Gruber states on the [website] for markfown: "Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers.", as the author argues that "[...] is insufficient to explress even the basic writing, with things like definition lists, local links, and table missing".
On the underspecification of markdown
At the point that markdown is underspecified with only ten elements that are allowed is totally understandable to me, but at the same time I know that markdown has created a canonical implementation that hasn't been updated since 2004 (~22 years as of writing this) and for this and some more reason CommonMark and the CommonMark Spec was created by John McFarlane, David Greenspan, Vicent Marti, Neil Williams, Benjamin Dumke-von der Ehe and Jeff Atwood.
Markdown & HTML
Furthermore the author states:
You can’t do anything remotely complicated in Markdown, only in HTML.
And I totally agree with this. But at the same time I know that markdown is, in the words of John Gruber:
Markdown is not a replacement for HTML, or even close to it. [...] The idea for Markdown is to make it easy to read, write, and edit prose. HTML is a publishing format; Markdown is a writing format. Thus, Markdown’s formatting syntax only addresses issues that can be conveyed in plain text.
John Gruber on the Inline HTML from the Markdown: Syntax Webpage
In other words: markdown wasn't intended to do complex and complicated markup in a form that isn't designed for the simple writing workflow from John Gruber.
And because of this design decision, there are many different implementations that build upon markdown and extend it with syntax.
Conclusion
I personally would argue that Markdown by itself is, contrary to what the author says, complete, portable and self-sufficient, but the extensions are not.