I tend to think that the best technology solves philosophical problems, not technical ones. The technical problem of "formatting text" and things like expressi

I tend to think that the best technology solves philosophical problems, not technical ones. The technical problem of "formatting text" and things like expressive power, etc are just not the problem that was unsolved when Markdown became popular. The problem it solves was: what markup language is easy enough to use that it can become ubiquitous? And the solution was: make something that is mostly useable as a text file but happens to also be a markup language. The difference from what other people were using at the time -- wordpress-style html formatting, for instance -- was night-and-day, so everyone jumped on it immediately.