[joliv]

Markdown and its kin are easier to read raw. Surrounding underscores, for example, break flow much less than <b> tags.

[dheera]

Interesting. Perhaps readability-wise yes, but in terms of actually writing it, I always find myself googling Markdown cheatsheets because I can't remember for the life of me whether single-asterisk or double-asterisk is bold or italic (the HTML counterparts are hard to screw up), and what the assortment of other symbols do. Like, my brain's parser wants to explode.

Also, * in Markdown appears to map to HTML <b>, </b>, and <li> and this drives me nuts, especially when these have to be used together.

[roryokane]

You can produce <li> with ‘-’ instead of ‘*’. ‘-’ has no other meaning.