alt Hacker NewsThis is just like the debate over YAML. In both cases, the language is simple enough, and people use it sanely enough in practice that I just don't care about the warts. Contrast this with something like C++, where the warts are less avoidable and therefore more worthy of notice. Markdown as I use it is functional and simple and no one has suggested an alternative I like better, so I keep using it.
Also, as I use it, Markdown is effectively plain text. I very rarely look at "rendered" markdown. I guess in practice I actually use "plain text" that just happens to look a lot like markdown by this article's definitions.
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Exactly this. At this point I read markdown as if it were rendered, with the exception of tables which are a mess visually in plain text.
But everything else, headings and bold and italics and lists, I’m honestly not sure I can tell the difference. It’s like watching movies with subtitles when you’re sufficiently experienced: your brain just fills in the gaps and you don’t even notice
I don't know YAML well enough, I never liked it. But if you want to write an halfway common marks compliant parser, then markdown is just nuts. It is just way too complicated for the simplicity it conveys. Look at lists, they can be freely nested, and contain all(?) other block elements. That is extreme overkill. If you need that much flexibility, then any wannabe "simple" markup is just the wrong choice.