I think the author is missing a fairly major point, that Markdown was intended to be a way to process text written the way people already wrote it. ASCII is ab

I think the author is missing a fairly major point, that Markdown was intended to be a way to process text written the way people already wrote it. ASCII is absolutely the best way to write documents, if you're working in a primarily ASCII environment. Crabbit old bastards like me who remember the dialup BBS days consider Markdown-like text to be standard - underline things with a row of hyphens, mark a heading by underlining with # symbols or = symbols depending on how "strong" you want the heading to be, emphasis words with *asterisks like this* and italicise with /slashes like this/ (okay they got that one a bit wrong but still the point stands). Make a bulleted list by indenting a bit and putting a * at the start of the line, and so on. Before Markdown-the-specification and set of libraries to transform text to HTML existed, there were already a wealth of documents in somewhat Markdown-like syntax. Being able to transform them into something that "kids these days" with their high-resolution 800x600 pixel bitmap displays can view in a cool font came long after.