Louis Davidson explains an opinion:
I had no idea what the three tick marks “` meant until soon after I left there because all my recent experience had been with use the Mammoth Word Document converter. It works pretty nice overall, but it had been something I had struggled with over the years trying to get other people’s documents into to work just right. (Ok, and my documents too.)
It worked by mapping styles in a Word Document to a style in a WordPress page. To do it well, I had my template with all the styles set up in the Word template with shortcut keys, which I used an Elgato Stream Deck to remember all the keys. I still use a stream deck for editing, which I will share about some day.
So when I started my own site, I tried hard to replicate that experience but better. Until recently, you couldn’t support plugins in WordPress without spending quite a bit more money than I was willing to spend on this site so I started trying to find the best way to work offline and then (more or less) paste in my text.
Click through for a bit of Louis’s journey. Also, Louis mentions being confused by the name and thinking it was “markup.” That’s because HTML is the Hypertext Markup Language, and John Gruber meant the name as a pun on heavier markup languages like HTML and XML, as Markdown involves much less marking up of the text.