DEV: <h1> in the Right Direction

In today’s edition:

• The memory of #WPMom lives on: The Kim Parsell Scholarship is now open for applications.
• WordPress (and the web at large) may be # Heading in the direction of Markdown, for LLM-friendliness sake.
• Client Notes: a place to put all those persnickety preferences, problems and pointers that pop up during projects.

Hot Off The Presses: What’s New?

Sure, this cat is adorable and everything.

But the real question:

Is he responsive for mobile?

Fun Fact: Did you know that physicist Marc-Antoine Fardin won an Ig Nobel Prize (the award for the most pointless scientific study) by proving that cats should actually be classified as a “non-Newtonian liquid” rather than a solid, due to their ability to alter their shapes to fill a container without changing their volume?

But enough about that… we can hardly contain our excitement as we share with you the latest updates from the WordPress world. 😉

Mark Me Down As Curious, But Skeptical…

The web may be developing a second, AI-facing layer, and Markdown is emerging as a candidate format.

On February 7th, Matt Mullenweg proposed making every URI on WordPress.org available with a vary/markdown equivalent. He means not just docs, but the entire shebang, from forums to directories.

Why Markdown?

Markdown, the lightweight syntax that lets you format plain text with characters like #, *, ( ) rather than complex tags, is significantly easier for AI agents to process than full HTML.

By stripping away layout, scripts, and interface noise, it can dramatically reduce token usage and lower the cost of machine parsing.

Less than a week after Matt’s blog post, Cloudflare launched “Markdown for Agents.”

With this feature sites can:

• Serve clean Markdown versions of pages to AI crawlers when requested
• Reduce token load
• Strip layout noise
• Make content easier and cheaper for LLMs to process

As the Cloudflare blog post describes it:

“Feeding raw HTML to an AI is like paying by the word to read packaging instead of the letter inside.”

Flip the toggle, and any page in your zone can be served as Markdown.

Broader Implications

Ernie Smith writes that although the current motivation for this Markdown make-over is AI, offering pages in Markdown would also make the web more accessible.

Brett Terpstra envisions an entirely Markdown web, quite a **bold** proposal.

The Critics

Not everyone is down for Markdown.

John Mueller, Google Search Advocate, called it a “stupid idea,” questioning whether LLM bots will treat it as anything more than a plain text file.

Jono Alderson is also a critic, insisting that a website is more than just a “container for words” and that flattening pages into Markdown removes crucial structure, context, and meaning.

And yeah, as Jono points out, at the end of the day this conversation starts to remind us of why Google eventually learned to render pages. To understand the internet like a human, you eventually have to learn to interpret all of the context you removed to create “LLM friendliness.”

Is Markdown a practical optimization, or a shortcut that strips away meaning? Should we be building a web for agents, humans, or both? Sounds like something we’re gonna need to hash out a little bit more. 😉

Kim Parsell Scholarship Continues To Support Women in WordPress

The Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship is back again this year, honoring the memory of a WordPress legend who helped many women break into the tech world with her mentorship and support.

The scholarship provides financial support to attend WordCamp Europe 2026, including ticket costs, round-trip airfare and lodging for the duration of the event.

It’s open to anyone who:

• Is an active WordPress contributor
• Identifies as a woman
• Has never attended WordCamp Europe before
• Has a financial need that might otherwise make it tricky to attend

👉 If this describes you, the link is here to apply.
👉 Read more about the scholarship here.

Applications are open until March 15th, 2026, so get them in!

Giving Your Brain a Break: Client Notes in The Hub

The more clients you’re managing, the more details you have to remember… from special requests to follow-up tasks to due-dates and notes. Those details are often scattered across email chains, documents, Slack threads and random notes.

Your brain? That squishy thing in your skull that’s mostly anxious thoughts and Backstreet Boys lyrics?

That’s NO place to keep all that stuff.

Instead, you need a way to capture all that client info and keep it handy, right where you’ll need it when you’re working.

That’s why we built Client Notes.

Now you can:

• Built a reference library of notes connected to each specific client.
• Create checklists, format with numbered and bulleted lists and include links to resources.
• Choose who sees what, with full control over visibility.

👉 Read about how it works.
👉 Give it a try in your Hub today.

Mind Bloggling Facts & Stats

• 150,825 at-rules on a single page?! That’s wild. The CSS Selection 2026 report has some pretty crazy outliers. (Source)
• 800,000 WordPress sites were exposed to unauthenticated remote code execution due to a critical vulnerability in the WPvivid Backup plugin. Lucas Montes cashed in on a bug bounty of $2,145 for spotting the issue. (Source)
• $30,000 is the goal: WP Accessibility Day has announced a fundraising campaign to support hosting an editor-level booth at WordCamp Europe 2026, where they plan to offer free accessibility checks and guidance. (Source)

Blogs & Resources You Shouldn’t Miss

Somewhere, someone is struggling with a broken embedded YouTube video on your site. Help them out, will ya!?

Give the people what they want! WPFeatureLoop lets users vote on feature requests directly inside the plugin dashboard.

🎶They see me scrollin’, they hatin’… 🎶 Customizing scrollbars just got even easier with scrollbar-color available in Chrome.

Remkus de Vries explains why WordPress performance is much more than slapping on a plugin and calling it a day.

Russell Aaron spills the tea about the hidden settings page in wp-admin you never knew existed.

We’re paying with love tonight: Jessie J must have been talking about WordPress agencies when she said, “It’s not about the money, money, money…”

Coffee Break Distractions

Making friends as an adult doesn’t have to be as difficult as everyone says it is.

You’ll never guess which Black Mirror storyline is coming true next!

Have you heard the band Pink Oyster Mushroom? I was listening to them when they were still underground. Heard the lead singer is a pretty fun guy…

“Write the HTML skeleton that is used on every web page.” Nice, but not exactly. 💀

Pokemon or Big Data company? See how many you can get right.

Meet Prune, officially Japan’s most chilled-out capybara.

Can you cry in space? Well… yes, but it gets messy.

And finally…

An otter-ly adorable sashimi dinner. (🔊 Sound on, the squeaks are adorable!)

Love this mix of nerdery and nonsense? Forward it to your favorite WordPress weirdo. 💗