This reminds me of a misconception a lot of people seem to have about Markdown. It's not "wrong" to present it to readers verbatim (i.e. not rendered to HTML),

This reminds me of a misconception a lot of people seem to have about Markdown. It's not "wrong" to present it to readers verbatim (i.e. not rendered to HTML), since Markdown is a codification of existing plaintext conventions, and was designed to look good verbatim. In other words, though it is often used for, it is not solely a vehicle for generating HTML.