Articles like this come up every so often, and they usually point to all the problems with Markdown -- slightly incompatible implementations, nonstandard extens

Articles like this come up every so often, and they usually point to all the problems with Markdown -- slightly incompatible implementations, nonstandard extensions, how difficult it is to correctly parse in all cases, how mixing non-tag markup and HTML offends proper sensibilities, etc. And I can't say that they're wrong, per se. Markdown is a terrific example of "worse is better." That's the thing, though -- the whole argument for "worse is better" is that it produces more successful software. In practice, it turns out that it's pretty easy for most people to write most things in Markdown, no matter which processor they're using, just merrily mixing in HTML (or template tags) when they need to. The arguments for AsciiDoc and ReStructuredText usually boil down to "they make difficult things easier," which they do -- but they tend to make more common things (links, images, blockquotes, footnotes [not technically "standard" Markdown but the [^fn] notation is nearly universal]) a little more difficult. Markdown, by contrast, makes the things you're typing all the time trivial, while still letting you do anything that you can do in HTML by, well, letting you do it in HTML.