It seems strange to me that in 2026 we still cannot open a Markdown document on just about any computer or phone and expect it to display properly without installing additional software. Markdown has been around for more than 20 years and has become an essential format for documentation, writing, publishing and sharing information. It is simple, portable, human-readable and supported by an enormous collection of applications and websites. Yet something as ordinary as receiving a .md file can still leave people staring at raw formatting syntax or looking for an application capable of displaying it as a document. We have operating systems that can open photographs, play videos, read PDFs and recognize countless complicated file formats without requiring us to think about how any of that works. I think Markdown deserves the same treatment.