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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.
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?
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)
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 is this 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.
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.
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 and then Windows 95 became standard. 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.
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.
The only times I don't use markdown, I use org-mode