I know I'm an outlier, but I started using "styles" in Word 5 for the Mac in high school around 1992 and tried to avoid writing papers without them. The troubl

I know I'm an outlier, but I started using "styles" in Word 5 for the Mac in high school around 1992 and tried to avoid writing papers without them. The trouble for teaching was with the tool being broadly available (through preinstallation or piracy), most people not having a manual, and none of the teachers being really familiar with it. With styles, Word could format a table of contents automatically without any issue. It could also format indexes and, I believe, cross references. (Interestingly, I think recovering MS Word for Mac documents before version 6 is difficult). I could tell Microsoft was trying to come up with a way to encourage style usage as they enhanced Word for Windows, but I think most people still defaulted to pushing things around with spaces and setting their fonts manually. HTML's default styles caused people to start with H3 or something like that, because H1 is usually frighteningly large. LaTeX came with much more reasonable default styles but nobody was going to be able to start using it without reading a bit about it and then coloring within the lines of someone else's document structure. I really appreciate that Markdown makes the headings easy. It doesn't give you a good way of demarcating sections and has no standard way to give hints to further processing. But you can definitely split up the document into rational parts and know that you can apply the formatting later.