I’m skeptical of markdown, and it isn’t because I don’t understand it - it’s because, yes it’s a nice quick way to write formatted text… until it isn’t, and all you want is some combination of two elements like indented but not a quote or code but the leading few words to be bold… or whatever, and suddenly 20 minutes is wasted trying to figure out why the markdown editor is being so stupid.
https://github.com/hanleybrand/mdid3-sysadmin/wiki/shell_plus-and-poking-around is a page I was working on recently where I had a number of “WHAT” moments when I’d check the page formatting - I get that it’s an edge case, but it’s one where I think I would have been better off using FCK to style html for me if I couldn’t be bothered to write the html, which frankly isn’t that hard anyway.
And that’s why I’m skeptical of markdown. The simple utility is nice enough, but we already have a very parsable text format in HTML - and the wysiwyg editors that are current are very nice and can be configured to write pretty structured html. And as much as people kvetch about html formatting surprises, at least I only had to know the foibles of one markup language. Except now people agree I have to know two, and the other I have to know in terms of itself, and how it renders to HTML, which is what everyone seems to do with it anyway.
So that makes it seem a lot less great, in my view.