alt Hacker News>Everyone seems to forget Markdown was invented for humans and incidentally for machines.
We already had plain text for that. Markdown was invented to be converted to HTML. It has no utility over plain text otherwise. The link and image syntax is doing what HTML tags do, but are less readable for people than just pasting the URL. The relationship to the machine isn't incidental, it's intrinsic.
Markdown largely serves the same role as things like vocal emphasis and intonation in speech. Here are some example sentences that have slightly different semantics communicated by markdown differences.
My cat is an idiot.
My cat is an idiot.
My cat is an idiot.