This language is literally the C++ of markup languages. Nearly everything can be done in 2 different ways which some of them might allow XSS and somehow leak memory in html.

Source: Why the heck are we still using Markdown??

It’s a delightful read that treats markdown far too seriously, which is what makes the writing genuinely funny.

Markdown has a special place in my heart and a special place within the nerdy / developer community because of its inherent internet-native syntax. Markdown started as a personal project by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz to quickly write something that can be transliterated to html. Original post: Markdown on Daring Fireball

So: markdown was NOT intended as a rich text replacement.

It was NOT intended as a programming language.

It was not even intended as a markup language. The cheeky name is a reflection of that.

p.s. the early internet days really were some lovely names - copyleft, markdown etc.

However, markdown, or more accurately, the markdown syntax has since been widely adopted by the internet and nerds in various places.

The latest adoption is within the LLM community, which are filled with nerds who had to write a lot and also deal with text tokens a lot. So, I am not surprised that they first went with markdown syntax.

However, markdown cannot scale as the artefacts generated by LLMs are growing in volume and complexity. So, I see the LLM community is now pivoting wholeheartedly into HTML.

Here’s Lucas Meijer (yes of unity fame) talking about how he prefers reading HTML artifacts from LLM. It seems like LLM harness developers are taking notice too.

Here’s Claude Code developer Thariq saying the same thing with support from Andrej Karpathy. Personally, this is trending the way I thought things would go. Context windows were smaller, output tokens were smaller and hence initially you had to be more token efficient.

HTML is a great language to help create far more digestible artifacts. I think it will also leverage the multi-modal nature of LLMs much better.

it also helps that they will take up more tokens ;)

So, overall, I am bullish on HTML standing up to the task. While I shall continue my love for markdown, even though it is REALLY not a perfect language for everything.

Personally, markdown + yaml frontmatter work great - it brings together how I’ve naturally operated with writing since I discovered them. And, just right often isn’t perfect.