I have wrote post about Markdown for PHP in Russian: http://plutov.by/post/markdown_php.
Jeff Atwood, I advise to you to add Markdown to your comment form 
Hi Jeff
Sorry if Iām using this blog post for advertising, but this is definitely related: Iām working on a Free (as in Free Speech) WYSIWYG editor for Markdown.
I like Markdown as well. During writing some tech docs and release notes, I find that two issues need to be fixed for Markdown.
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The underline. Now a paired single underline makes the word it wraps up italic, while a paired double underline makes the word it wraps up bold, which behaves the same as aterisks. I really hope that it only supports the asterisk for italic/bold usage. Or if we can get some statistics on the frequency of underline and asterisk, we can choose the less-use one for that markup.
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The table. Creating table in a Markdown text is really painful(Iām using the html table markups to achieve it). A suitable markup that makes table creation easy will be welcome!
Another candidate you might consider is Rimu http://rimumarkup.org/
a new readable text to HTML markup language.
Disclosure: I am the author Rimu (and AsciiDoc).
It shares the Markdown philosphy and has some common syntax but takes
it quite a bit further. The implementation is clean and lightweight
(<14KB of JavaScript, written in TypeScript, with no dependencies).
Jeff, could you please edit the original post with an āUpdateā that links to the new W3C group (http://www.w3.org/community/markdown/)? I think itās a big development, and very few people who come to this post would notice the link buried, as it is now, in the comments.
Cheers!
Iāve read most of the comments, itās funny how everyone promote their own favorite markup. Donāt worry, Iāll do the same, soon.
Iād like to share your enthusiasm for Markdown. Hey, Markdown is almost everywhere: on tumblr, on stackoverflow, on githubā¦ It mostly pleases geeks over normal people, because very few ānormalā people enjoy using any specific markup for formatting text, but anyway, Markdown share a big part of the small market of the lightweight markup langages.
I donāt really enjoy Markdown. Probably I feel a bit jealous of this success, especially when, like Toby said, there are technically superior alternatives, but they are eclipsed.
Yes, Markdown is fragmented: too many versions and derivatives. Why? Simply because the default Markdown lacks options and possibilities. You canāt even strike-through with Markdown, so they proposed to add < del > (which is html) for this purpose. Since I donāt enjoy writing HTML, I donāt really want to encumber my texts with HTML tags in a lightweight markup, which is supposed to get rid of HTML.
Also, I donāt like the regular Markdown markup: single symbol such as * or _ can often mixed be up with what you need to type (contrary to double symbols such as //, ** or __).
People of the Creole project spent quite a long time to rationalise the āmost logicalā Wiki markup (see http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/Reasoning). Itās very good, unfortunately they didnāt even mention txt2tags, which 90% of Creole is looking alike.
Besides, Txt2tags is much older than Creole (and than Markdown as well) and Creole doesnāt cover all possible user case, so it canāt really be a common wiki langage for all the others: you canāt underline in Creole, seriously. Some people will probably claim itās not āsemantically correctā to use underline, or to talk about italic when it should be called emphasis. The good new with txt2tags is that you can redefine almost everything (input and output) because there are a builtin preprocessor and a postprocessor (using regex).
So you can conceive new markup, or change the default output (for example < strong > instead of < b >), just with a single pre/postprocessor, and it will remain a valid, standard Txt2tags file. No need to create a āgit flavored markdownā or a new derivative.
Well, I favor txt2tags, but I think something should be done so choosing reStructuredText, or Txt2tags, or Markdown, or Asciidoc shouldnāt be compulsory nor prevented, and everyone should be able to choose one favorite markup and use it everywhere. TextWheel could be an option, but the code hasnāt been touched since 2009.
Is there any update?
Just for the record, everybody is absolutely AGAINST your third ācommon gotchaā, automatic return-based linebreaks.
Markdown is, and should remain, plain text.
If you need a manual br-eak (not a new paragraph), you should end the line with two [del]spaces[/del] [ins]backslashes[/ins]!
New spec!
Also, why not invite Google into it? They work well.
I think it would be great if markdown could support the typical table syntax used by console applications, for example; mysql
With the easy availability of HTML 5 Wizzywig editors, markdown is an unneccesary layer of indirection.
Markdown has its place, and its place is shrinking, but NOT as a public facing editor.
It was a mistake to put it in Stack Overflow. It has no useful purpose there.
Hi, my suggestion is, please contact with github and stackoverflow. Unite with them, and itāll be smooth going.
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Although I realize that, by using WYSIWYG editors, the question what kinds of delimiters are used for what kind of markup becomes somewhat moot, I still wish there was a more intuitive alternative where the more obvious
*bold*
/italics/
_underline_
would apply, in stead of what is used now
Indeed, that has now happened. 