John Gruber & Aaron Swartz

John Gruber is a writer and tech blogger from Philadelphia who wanted a way to write for the web without drowning in HTML tags. Aaron Swartz was a prodigy from Chicago who co-created RSS at 14, helped build Reddit, co-founded Creative Commons, and believed fiercely that information should be free.

In 2004, Gruber was frustrated that writing for the web meant writing *code*, not *prose*. He wanted plain text that looked readable even before rendering. Aaron Swartz, then 17, helped him design the spec — a teenager and a blogger collaborating on what would become the most widely used text format on the internet.

Markdown lets you write plain text that converts to formatted HTML. A line starting with # becomes a heading. Text between *asterisks* becomes italic. It's so intuitive that millions of people use it without knowing its name — every GitHub README, every Discord message with bold text, every Notion page.

Markdown is used in virtually every developer tool on earth. GitHub processes billions of Markdown files. Slack, Discord, Notion, Obsidian, Reddit — all use Markdown or dialects of it. Every wiki page on this platform is written in it.

Markdown is the foundation beneath everything you're reading right now. This wiki page, every README on GitHub, every documentation site. It connects to every single package in this graph indirectly — because every package has a README.md.

Aaron Swartz was prosecuted by the U.S. government for downloading academic papers from JSTOR — papers he believed should be free and accessible to everyone. He died on January 11, 2013, at age 26. He was right about information wanting to be free. He was right about a lot of things.