| You are completely right. The underlying theme here is that the requirements matter. The requirement for Markdown is to be simple and easy. It's intended for use by people who are going to ignore whatever specs and documentation there are. They'll write a little comment, a bug ticket, or a readme and they might need things like links, bold, italic, etc. And the job is to turn that into some legible HTML. So most of its features are simple and easy to remember. Just add a blank line for a new paragraph, prefix your bullets with a -. and so on. Markdown is undeniably simple and easy to learn. Which is why it got so popular. It has edge cases but they don't really matter. It has obscure features (e.g. tables) most people don't use, so those don't matter either. And there's a wide range of things it can't do that also don't matter. The job never was being a drop in replacement for more complex tools. It was removing the need to use those for the simple use cases and be simply good enough. The alternatives each chase requirements that are important to their creators but not to most casual users, or indeed the people that integrate markup tools. And of course the more these alternatives differ from Markdown, the harder of a sell it becomes. And the more there are, the less likely it is for any of them to become more popular than markdown. At this point, markdown is a common default in things like issue trackers, readme's on Github/Gitlab, etc. Any tool integrating some kind of markup language support in their content management is more likely to be using markdown than anything else at this point. The reason is simply that using something else breaks the principle of the least amount of surprise for the user. Markdown is the largest common denominator. It's good enough and easy enough to deal with. So, most new things would favor using that over anything else. It's a self re-enforcing thing. |
Or the lowest.
This is how populist politics works. The thing that appeals to the most people isn't necessarily the thing we should be doing.
The internet and web appealed to a small percentage of people in the early 90s, and it was glorious. You had to put in effort to get anything out, which meant most people didn't bother, which meant it was a nice place. The music industry similarly had a high level of entry. Both are filled with crap now.
Elitist old man shouting at clouds? Maybe. Doesn't mean I'm wrong though.