> As the result, the base Markdown syntax can have an extra set of features available only in a particular specification. The big win of Markdown is that the s

> As the result, the base Markdown syntax can have an extra set of features available only in a particular specification. The big win of Markdown is that the source reads just fine, without conversion to html. The source itself is formatted, especially a monospace font. That makes it easy to write, since you can still easily attend to both content and formatting while writing it. It also makes it readable by folks in terminal or text editor. That also means that if your converter doesn't support some special feature, it will just leave it there and you can still just read it. On the other hand, if as a reader or writer I have to go to some other part of the document or some entirely separate file, e.g. to find out the value of an attribute or edit an included external code snippet, that really interrupts the process. Same for computing if-else clauses.