(2004-03-21) Markdown Smart Ascii

Mark Down is a new SmartAscii format. Markdown is free for personal use, and costs $50 per domain for commercial use. Does that mean the format requires that payment, even if you write your own rendering code?

Update: John Gruber makes a great Framing case for SmartAscii. But there's a reason why plain text browsers like Lynx don't just show you the raw HTML source code. It's simply not meant to be a readable format. Doesn't it strike you as odd to write in a format that isn't readable? Suddenly, it struck me as absurd... Thus, Markdown. Email-style writing for the web.

Aaron Swartz discusses it and notes he's written an app to convert to Mark Down from HTML. He says Mark Down is Open Source.