Comment by DougWebb
6 years ago
As user you shouldn't be concerned by how it looks. Thats job of overall design and that might change depending where you publish / who designed it. You shouldn't make that decision because you don't have the required context.
As the writer of Markdown content, you're often both the user of the content and the publisher of the content, so you do care about how it looks. Even if you're just the user, your intention when writing is to communicate something, and the eventual appearance of your content impacts how it is interpreted by the reader. So you still care about how your writing will look, which forces you to care about how the publishing process interprets the markdown syntax.
I am not saying you can't be both user and publisher. I am saying that these are two different processes often made by different people.
When you publish book you have mostly zero power over how it will be designed. And honesty you should have zero power over it because there are people editors/designers/typesetters who dedicate their lives to exactly that. Better to let them handle it. Same goes for the web.