Markdown gets a system UTI in Apple's OS 27

Apple’s third OS 27 developer beta quietly gave Markdown something it never had: a built-in system Uniform Type Identifier. The identifier is net.daringfireball.markdown, conforming to public.utf8-plain-text — which means John Gruber’s own reverse-DNS string, minted for a format he invented in 2004, is now baked into macOS, iOS, and the rest of the 27 line as a first-class data type.

We love the loop in this. Gruber assigned that identifier twenty-two years ago; Apple adopts the exact string; and in response he updates his 2011 UTI recommendation from public.plain-text to public.utf8-plain-text to match the encoding Apple picked. One person’s convention, ratified by the platform, then tidied by its author — no committee, no standards body, just a good idea that held.

It’s a small thing that says something we believe: durable formats beat clever ones. Markdown spent two decades as “just text files with a convention,” and that plainness is exactly why it’s still here to be adopted — a .md file outlives every app that ever opened it because it was never locked to any of them. The OS finally knowing what Markdown is isn’t really the milestone. The milestone is that the indie web built something plain enough to last this long.