Buried in here the mention of Textile.

IYKYK. Joyent. TextDrive. Textpattern CMS.

Imagining an alternate universe where it might have been Textile. https://textile-lang.com/

Really it comes down to historically the time and place when Markdown was needed and the power of momentum leading to its mass adoption.

I liked Textile a lot better initially, and it came out first. And interestingly, both launched at the same time on the platform (Movable Type) where Markdown debuted. So it really was sort of a clean A-B test about which one users chose.

This piece was already pretty long, so I cut out most of the sidebar about Dean Allen and Textile, but he was a special guy, and certainly influential on so many parts of this era, not just Markdown.

That looks similar to reStructuredText: https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/restructuredtext/...

I felt that Textile was the superior Sony Betamax to Markdown's VHS. Also, IME any no-coders I've known get freaked out by Markdown and always chose to use a rich text editor instead.

Fun fact: For my first SW job I had to develop a site for a bunch of academics, and they wanted a way to enter rich text. I suggested textile, and they loved it. At the time, Markdown was not more popular, and I thought textile had the better syntax (it may also have had better library support).