Comment by somat
1 day ago
That is the point, markdown has nice looking plain text, It is a terrible formatting language, it has no semantic ability. The whole point of markdown is that it is nice looking plaintext that can be typeset. I would even go so far to say that the intended primary render of markdown is the plaintext
This is why I don't like proposals to make markdown a better markup language, I understand the intent, markdown sucks as a decent language, but these "improvements" make the plain text ugly, and that is most of the value of markdown lost right there.
It's NOT nice-looking plain text. It's text littered with a bunch of formatting characters that aren't respected by any lightweight viewer. So why have them in there?
I'm not proposing to make it a better markup language. I just want to VIEW it with the formatting that it calls for.
It's mystifying that people are actually opposed to this. It's like a massive psychology-class experiment, when a bunch of confederates champion an obviously-absurd point of view to see if the subject of the experiment will hold his ground.