Reading up on John Gruber

Markdown replaced complex .doc and .docx formats because its plain-text simplicity eliminates corruption and works universally across modern tools.

Markdown became ubiquitous due to its simplicity, plain-text nature, and portability, despite ongoing standardization debates.

Markdown, created by John Gruber in 2004 as a simple plain-text formatting tool for blogging, has become the ubiquitous standard for annotating everything from AI prompts to code repositories.