[jimmytucson]

But you don't need the head and body stuff. This renders perfectly fine in a web browser on my local machine:

    <h1>My Title</h1>
    <p>This is a paragraph.</p>

For sure, you need an end tag, and Markdown doesn't. But for simple note taking, are you really writing deeply nested HTML?

[davisoneee]

The main benefit is that markdown is really readable _without_ rendering. You don't need to edit and then open in a browser.

You can comfortably read plaintext that has a little structure, while HTML adds some ceremony that makes it a bit harder to glance at the material as the tags are much more in your face.