I don't like these "simple" formats because of non-obvious escaping and overloading too many "common" characters, which is even context sensitive (in HTML, it's

I don't like these "simple" formats because of non-obvious escaping and overloading too many "common" characters, which is even context sensitive (in HTML, it's just three characters anywhere, & → &amp;, < → <, > → >, and maybe " → " if you use attributes). Even in the provided article, there are many such constructs: - we learn that we need to escape === and --- and ```, but I assume only when it's on a line alone, which seems OK as you probably won't write a paragraph that contains only ``` - then we learn we also need to escape * (e.g. to write 2*2=4), anywhere in the text, but I guess not inside ``` block, so we now need context instead of "find and replace". The escaping mechanism is not mentioned, but hopefully the world has settled on \*, except for dokuwiki which uses %% or whatever - and you need to escape [ and ] (everywhere or only inside link?) - How do you do a link or emphasis inside ```? In some MD flavors, it's outright impossible. (e.g. I need to emphasize something in a pasted code, or I'd like to make a function call clickable as "go to definition/documentation"). In HTML you can use most tags, such as <strong> and <a>, inside <pre>