I started keeping a journal at twelve. The platform was something called LiveJournal. After that came Wordpress, then Medium, then Notion, then Obsidian. Every migration lost something — formatting, links, attachments, or at least my memory of where any of it was.

The only things that survived were the plain Markdown files I happened to write on the side as "drafts." A .md written ten years ago on Windows XP, five years ago on a Mac, last week on Linux — they all open in any text editor today.

Why it lasts#

Not because Markdown is elegantly designed. It has plenty of warts: ugly tables, inconsistent nested-list behavior, weird asymmetry between image and link syntax.

It survives because it's barely a format — just an ASCII convention for hinting at typography. # title for a heading because it looks like a heading. - for a list because typewriters did the same. The "barely a format" property means: even if every Markdown renderer in the world disappears, the files are still readable English (or Chinese) sentences.

What it implies#

I can completely separate "writing" from "publishing." When I write, all I touch is a .md file — any editor, any sync tool, any backup scheme works. Publishing is a separate, replaceable step.

I don't care what generates HTML in ten years. I care that those Markdown files are still there.

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