[mynegation]

Markdown by itself _is_ pretty readable. Ultimately, you want to have it rendered though. This is why live preview helps me a lot. Markdown, while readable by itself, has many gotchas that may screw up the rendered result: newline here, wrong indentation there, forgot to put pipe symbol in the table etc etc. It is much easier and faster to catch these things right away than after the fact. I compare this to the on-the-fly syntax check in IDEs that saved me countless compile-and-fix cycles and boosted my productivity tremendously.

[ergothus]

...which is why the above poster recommended syntax-highlighting. Not raw MD, but not double the output space either.