Markdown Ate the World

Summary

I have always enjoyed the act of typing words and seeing them come up on screen. While my favorite word processor of all time might be WordPerfect (here), I've used almost all of them. These programs were what sold me on the entire value proposition of computers. They were like typewriters, which I had used in school, except easier in every single way. You could delete things. You could move paragraphs around. It felt like cheating, and I loved it.As time has gone up what makes up a "document" in word processing has increased in complexity. This grew as word processors moved on from being proxies for typewriters and into something closer to a publishing suite. In the beginning programs like WordPerfect, WordStar, MultiMate, etc had flat binary files with proprietary formatting codes embedded in there. When word processors were just proxies for typewriters, this made a lot of sense. But as Microsoft Word took off in popularity and quickly established itself as the dominant word processor, we saw the rise of the .doc file format. This was an exponential increase in complexity from what came before, which made sense because suddenly word processors were becoming "everything tools" — not just typing, but layout, images, revision tracking, embedded objects, and whatever else Microsoft could cram in there.The .doc: A Filesystem Inside Your FileAt its base the .doc is a Compound File Binary Format, which is effectively just a FAT file system with the file broken into sectors that are chained together with a File Allocation Table. It's an interesting design. A normal file system would end up with sort of a mess of files to try and contain everything that the .doc has, but if you store all of that inside of a simplified file system contained within one file then you could optimize for performance and reduced the overhead that comes with storing separate objects in a flat file. It also optimizes writes, because you don't need to rewrite the entire file when you add an object ...