Aaron swartz announces the creation of markdown, a lightweight markup language developed with John gruber to make writing web content as easy as writing email. The post describes the goal of converting plain text with email-like syntax into HTML automatically, and also mentions a reverse tool (html2text) that converts HTML back to markdown. Both tools are released as free software under the GNU GPL. The comments section features a lively debate comparing markdown to reStructuredText and textile, with John gruber himself weighing in on why he chose to create a new format rather than extend existing ones.
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