[nooyurrsdey]

> It should be readable, as a complete document, in its existing text form without any transformation.

Is this _needed_, or is this nice to have?

A markup language annotates text and describes _how it should be rendered_. It feels redundant to describe how a document should be rendered (presumable for final consumption) _and_ have the document be readable as-is.

Case in point: I'd argue that HTML is a great markup language. I wouldn't call it the most readable in its current form.

I agree with the spirit here, but it ultimately feels more "nice to have" than truly required.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Very much disagree. Think about Markdown readmes. It's great, and very useful, that when looking through a git repo that I can just look at the readme in a shell or text editor, and also as important, diffs when changing a markdown file are a lot cleaner/easier to understand. Simultaneously, it's also great that I get a nice formatted readme page when I'm browsing a GitHub repo, for example.

As the sibling commenter said, if all you care about is the output why wouldn't you just write it in Word?

[kilociraptor]

>> It should be readable, as a complete document, in its existing text form without any transformation.

> Is this _needed_, or is this nice to have?

It's kind of the ur usecase of markup languages. Without this property WYSIWYG is significantly better.

[asicsp]

I like markup over WYSIWYG because I can use my preferred text editor, can be version controlled, reused in multiple places (reddit, github, etc).

I like that the markup I use (Markdown) is readable as is, but I wouldn't mind losing a bit of readability for more features.

[lmm]

> Case in point: I'd argue that HTML is a great markup language.

By what measure? I'd consider HTML an awful, awful markup language.