MDN converted to Markdown

Firefox going to the dark side

In 2021, the Open Web Docs team, with help from Mozilla, the W3C, and the wider web docs community, converted the authoring format for MDN Web Docs - all 11,000 pages of it - from HTML to Markdown.

There's some irony that the central documentation portal for web standards went through a conversion of porting from said web standards (aka HTML) to markdown.

It also makes sense. While HTML is the markup language of the web, it is not a language that is human friendly. That spot belongs to markdown.

Love or hate it, markdown occupies the same spot in culture as javascript and JSON - a universally adopted standard that has achieved escape velocity and is now pushed forward by its own momentum.

A general truth that seems obvious but is often overlooked - for something to have mass appeal, it needs to be easy to use. Its not about re-inventing the wheel but meeting people where they are.


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