[jibalt]

Markdown is "real plain text".

Why not just use letters and avoid punctuation ... that's all Markdown is: punctuation.

> Homer was able to write the fall of troy and Shakespeare Hamlet without bold text.

Oh really? Have you ever seen a manuscript?

Unlike handwritten text, plain text doesn't provide a means to underline, use italics, subscripts and superscripts, etc. Things like Markdown provide conventions for denoting such things in plain text.