@shinmera Swartz didn't create Markdown, no, but John Gruber credits him with a pretty instrumental role in its development:

daringfireball.net/projects/ma…

@shinmera According to Wikipedia:

In collaboration with John Gruber, Swartz co-created Markdown – a lightweight markup language for generating HTML – and was the author of its html2text translator. The syntax for Markdown was influenced by Swartz's earlier atx language (2002), which today is primarily remembered for its syntax for specifying headers, known as atx-style headers

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Sw…

So it seems he was a co-creator.

American computer programmer and internet-political activist (1986-2013)

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

@DeltaLima Yes John is the creator but scroll down to the "Acknowledgements" section:

> Aaron Swartz deserves a tremendous amount of credit for his feedback on the design of Markdown’s formatting syntax. Markdown is *much* better thanks to Aaron’s ideas, feedback, and testing. Also, Aaron’s html2text is a very handy (and free) utility for turning HTML into Markdown-formatted plain text.

@tryonk "I'm all for making sure creators are rewarded for their work."

This topic keeps making me think about the people who *actually* develop those Space X rockets, among other things…