[StephenGL]

My objection to Markdown is that its just a proxy for something else and only fixes a very limited set of HTML issues. If you have to learn Markdown you may as well learn HTML. The security issues need to have pressure applied to the browsers to fix.

[Turing_Machine]

Markdown requires far less typing than HTML for common use cases.

    *This is italic.*
    <i>This is italic.</i>

or (semantic version):

    <em>This is italic.</em>

The second has three times the markup overhead as the first and the third has four times the markup overhead. That matters. If you're writing long-form text it matters a lot.

[Turing_Machine]

Paragraphs are even worse. In Markdown you just hit return. In HTML you have to write <p></p> or <p />. That really adds up for a long piece.

[ryandvm]

Learning HTML doesn't solve squat. The value of Markdown is that it's easy to edit with multiple tools and it's easy on the eyes whether you're looking at as plaintext or in a Markdown viewer.

Learning HTML doesn't help people who want to stay in the text editor.

[Aloha]

I edit a webpage, its a modern page with php, JSON and jquery elements - but the large majority of it is in html, markdown does nothing for me, because I'd need to convert it anyhow back to HTML for the webserver.

Markdown however would be very useful in replacing the groff code used in man files for example, if perhaps it were a little more expressive - it has the advantage of being easy to parse when not render, and easy to build a renderer for.