[a3n]

I keep a text file that grows noticeably every day. I write it in Restructured Text (could have been Markdown) for two reasons:

1. My text editor (Vim in this case) renders the text file in colors, and helps me distinguish different elements.

2. If I want, I can export to html.

Markdown and the like grew out of what people were already doing in plain text: dashes and asterisks for bullets, indentation, etc.

I would much rather write plain text, or minimally marked up Markdown or rst, than have to write <tags> for everything, especially for something like my text file that isn't really intended for the web, but can be converted if needed. html is not really meant to be read, but rendered. The various markdowns can be comfortably written, and read as is.

My 2c.