What I like about it is that it's kinda everywhere, so I don't need to learn yet another documentation format for each project I work on. It's kinda like git: i

What I like about it is that it's kinda everywhere, so I don't need to learn yet another documentation format for each project I work on. It's kinda like git: it may not be the best, but it's the standard and I have already learned it, so anything that's not git is less comfortable. Also, I love the fact that my text editor (vim) knows how to interpret the Markdown tags and color/bold the text accordingly. I get meaningful syntax coloring on a text file. Yay \o/. Regarding your last argument: if you need some kind of syntax formatting and you're not going for Markdown, what the hell are you using? Chances are that whatever you choose is worse because (i) the chances of users being unfamiliar with it are higher and (ii) the format is not a simple as Markdown.