[anthonybullard]

Try turning it over to non-technical people. You will be surprised at how non-intuitive html can be, and what extremely nasty things they will do when they decide to learn just a little bit, ie style attribute hacking galore. If you want dead simple, consistently styled content to be written by non-technical folks, Markdown is much better IMHO.

[dnomad]

This is something that can change with a bit of training.

All the "plain text" formatting languages tend to break down. They work until they don't and then somebody invents yet another text-based pseudo-markup language. Asciidoc is best of the worst but fundamentally it's a bad idea. If you're willing to make the investment in tools and training there's a lot of value in enabling people to write real HTML (and MathML) or, better, Docbook + domain-relevant XML that produces real UI-agnostic structured information.

The problem here is that the tools are terrible or expensive or bloated. There's no reason why this should be the case and it's likely a real market opportunity.

[krapp]

>If you want dead simple, consistently styled content to be written by non-technical folks, Markdown is much better IMHO.

The spec for Markdown's syntax includes HTML in its entirety, though...

[zellyn]

Oh, markdown is great. I meant the things that are just different syntax for HTML.