Comment by rurban

That's missing the whole point.

I was there when those easy markup languages were invented. It started all with wiki's (after Stallman's info of course). The first one being C2, and then the discussion about better formatting syntax on the MeatBallWiki because we had many different wiki's back then (long before MediaWiki). I was with PhpWiki, which had a good start because every webserver had php support, but almost nobody perl.

Links should have no different text, as this would hide the target. A security problem. Mediawiki destroyed that because Jimbo had a different vision, and because they didn't care. Markdown followed because Gruber had no idea and followed Jimbo, not the consensus from the other wiki's. More support for the []() link syntax came then with inline images, even when that was a bigger security nightmare.

Headers switched from the simple ## prefixes to the underlines, which just looked better, and most engines supported both.

Markdown was just a compromise of all the existing wiki formatting, which was simple enough. It should stay simple and readable, because that's what made POD better than other more verbose formatting styles. Mostly info, rST, AsciiDoc, org-mode (which was the most verbose). Which replaced troff and TeX. People still wrote books in GNU info, rST, AsciiDoc, POD and org-mode. But Markdown looked better on both eyes, the pure ascii eyes and the formatted layout.