This is superficial, and one could trivially write a markdown style pre- processor if you wanted the former syntax That feels just a tiny bit circular. It'

This is superficial, and one could trivially write a markdown style pre- processor if you wanted the former syntax That feels just a tiny bit circular. It's like if I wrote a huge set of C++ preprocessor macros so that I can write my code in JavaScript, have the preprocessor do its magic and transpile it down to plain C++, and then have it compiled down to machine code. One way or another, you need such a table. For TeX the table consists of ASCII symbol names. Not necessarily. It's not difficult to memorize the commands that produce commonly used symbols; `\pi`, `\sum_{}^{}`, `\int`, `\frac{}{}`, `\times`, etc. They're all really, really mnemonic with a consistent naming scheme, and if you don't like a symbol's command, you can always alias it to a new command in the preamble. I'll give you the last part though, that was my mistake - but I did meant that the environments used to render HTML as well as certain associated standards are shifting towards their more common uses, which are along the lines of websites and blogs rather than research papers.