Comment by cornishpixels
6 years ago
Honestly, the single biggest problem with Markdown is that it's been implemented in so many different ways by so many different people. This is largely because a lot of corner cases were simply not defined.
When a website uses Markdown for input, it's extremely tough to be sure of how to format certain things, especially when multiple different syntaxes combine. (I'm thinking of things like list+code block; or bold+italics, or list+line break, etc.)
Markdown has similarities with CSV which is also underspecified and has varying implementations. Even simple things like quoting don't work consistently across applications.
That has not stopped countless applications from using CSV because it's so useful to have a simple transfer format. CSV corner cases usually don't hurt too badly because you can usually rule them out based on the source or sink of the data.