I'll add to this one: Markdown is perfectly capable of using numbers as ordinals. What it's not capable of—bizarrely—is using letters as ordinals. You cannot ha

I'll add to this one: Markdown is perfectly capable of using numbers as ordinals. What it's not capable of—bizarrely—is using letters as ordinals. You cannot have the following: a) foo b) bar c) baz You have to do that manually. And it won't indent, or re-number automatically, or anything else. I don't know whether Gruber thought "I'll get to that later" or if he isn't the sort of person that ever writes a/b/c/d/e lists, or if he figured it was too hard to adapt the parser for it, but the result is that you can't do that in vanilla Markdown, which means you also can't do that in documents published in Github. Which is why we've moved our document chain to Asciidoc. :)