Author here: Goal here was to focus more on what led to Markdown itself, with a bit of details around how other takes (MultiMarkdown, CommonMark, GitHub Flavore

Author here: Goal here was to focus more on what led to Markdown itself, with a bit of details around how other takes (MultiMarkdown, CommonMark, GitHub Flavored Markdown) took it further, in the same way that Markdown in some ways took ideas from earlier formats further or honed them down to fit what Markdown was aimed at. There's definitely space to dig into the whole family of plain text syntax both before and after Markdown (including things like Org-mode, C2's wiki markup, Pandoc, Todo.txt, and more that were mentioned elsewhere in this discussion).