Every technical writer uses markdown daily and few stop to ask why it is called that. The name is not a pun; it is a design rule, and the rule explains why the format has outlived a dozen richer ones.
I was preparing a workshop on Quarto, which builds its whole workflow on a markdown variant, and was reading the excellent Quarto documentation when I came across the line that names the rule, from the format’s author:
A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. — John Gruber
Markup languages, HTML above all, mark text up: they add tags around it that a machine reads and a person has to see past. Markdown marks text down: the asterisks, hashes and dashes are the marks people were already making in plain-text email to show emphasis, headings and lists, so a document is readable before any conversion and stays readable after. I had always thought of markdown as a shorthand for HTML. It is the other way round: the plain text is the document, and the HTML is one rendering of it.
Names. Carry. Intent. Markdown. Stays. Readable. Unmarked. Plain. Text. First.
References
- Gruber, J. (2004). Markdown: Syntax, Philosophy
- Quarto guide