[ravenstine]

It depends on the intent. Markdown is meant to be readable on its own. If you don't plan on reading Markdown files in some sort of plain text editor, then the benefit of Markdown is greatly diminished.

Also, no one has implemented a really good experience for writing HTML, not for webpages, but simple documents. It could be really easy to write HTML mostly by hand if an editor could dynamically convert Markdown-like syntax into HTML tags on the fly. That way, the resulting document is definitely HTML, and not up to the interpretation of some flavor of Markdown.

Such an editor can also do things to try and soft-preview what emphasis the HTML represents. Here's an example of an experiment I worked on in this direction a long time ago: https://codepen.io/Ravenstine/pen/gyMVNx

^^ Never mind the pompous attitude I had when I wrote the placeholder text for it.