[kijinbear]

Completely agreed. The method described in the article requires commenters to use HTML tags and even know how to balance them. In addition, it is supposed to detect code blocks automagically, which would be prone to errors. (How do you know whether a block of text is English or Python?)

Markdown is terse, easy to write, and readable even when rendered in plain text. There's a reason why so many web sites, from Reddit to Github to Stack Exchange, uses Markdown exclusively.

As for the alternatives: Wikitext ''seriously'' '''overloads''' the '''''apostrophe''''', often needs to be supplemented with <u>HTML</u> anyway, and contains [[wiki-specific syntax]] which is not relevant in most blog-commenting situations. BBCode is just a bastardized subset of HTML. It's popular in old-fashioned forum software, but I see no reason to use it in new applications.

[mtogo]

Absolutely agree about bbcode, i was just using it as an example since i couldn't think of any good markdown replacements besides wikitext.

[kijinbear]

There's Textile, but its handling of blockquotes and code samples is much less convenient than Markdown. Github's wiki used to use Textile, and it sucked.