[philgr]

He lost me in this paragraph:

> The original purpose of .MD is that it can be read without converting it to another format like HTML (...) .MD is designed not to be rendered for display, it is meant to be the display.

And this is the first paragraph from Markdown's introduction[1]:

> Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

Keywords here: "for web writers" and "convert it". Let me say it again: this is the first paragraph you read when you look for Markdown.

[1]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

[adamhyde]

The link you are referring to is for a perl script to convert markdown to HTML. It is not markdown, the syntax, referred to in that article. You would have understood that if you read the next paragraph

"Thus, “Markdown” is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML. "

The article was about the former, your comment confused it with the later. Cheers.