[jonhohle]

When the markup’s first design goal is to be parsable in linear time (and then proceeds to have a bunch of rules to support that goal instead of flexibility for humans) I don’t think there is much chance of catching on as a general markup language.

Markdown was originally a loose formalization of how people already wrote text only emails. It was how _people_ wrote, not how to optimize for the computer.

[civilized]

It's not like all humans are born knowing how to read and write Markdown. A standard that is slightly less flexible or intuitive for (some) humans while enabling vastly more machine applications could be a win.

[Shog9]

Could be, but mostly isn't. This thread and others like it are always full of folks lamenting that some other markup language isn't as popular or well-supported or both, even though said language has more features, a better spec, and got there first.

Maybe Markdown just hit the sweet spot. But I actually suspect it's something else: as soon as it's very convenient to have machines ingesting and producing a language, it becomes tempting to create tooling that is unnecessarily strict in what it will accept while at the same time spitting out markup that is unusually difficult for humans to read. A sort of specialized violation of the Robustness Principle.

The most famous example of this was probably XHTML, but even HTML5 suffers from it. And so we end up with stuff like Markdown because HTML tooling is too hostile to work with directly, and AsciiDoc because DocBook XML is similarly awful. They don't have to be, but...