Comment by atoav
2 days ago
Let me explain what I meant with opinionated:
Markdown decided for the users what the needed formatting options are, instead of giving them a bunch of tools that they could then combine in many different ways. The latter would be unopinionated as it doesn't force the opinions of the devs onto the users.
For example, why doesn't markdown have columns? Why do tables have to have headers? Etc. The reason is someone decided to do it that way on purpose.
Markdown is limited because it covers what its creator (single), needed for his blog. That’s it. Markdown was birthed as a single Perl script (with bugs that are still present).
Tables don’t have to have headers in Markdown. It doesn’t even have tables to begin with! Not in the original specification which still exists. But there are certain flavours of Markdown which add support for tables, and those may or may not require headers. Each flavour implements features of Markdown as it see fit, and those may or not exist in other flavours or be implemented differently.