The author clearly doesn't understand the appeal of it. Some of the points don't make sense. For example, he says it separates the design from the content. E

The author clearly doesn't understand the appeal of it. Some of the points don't make sense. For example, he says it separates the design from the content. Er, no, it doesn't. It puts the design in the content, but in a human readable and writable way, like an old type-written document. The chief selling point of markdown for me is I can write simple, portable and usually short documents which can be easily read and edited in a text editor, and that you can put under version control. And you can transform it into other rich text formats if you want a pretty document too. In that sense, it's a bit like LaTex, but not as hard to understand or use. I would agree that the lack of standardisation is a problem, and that doing complicated things in it starts losing the benefit. But for simple documents it's just great. Edit: I guess it does separate the design from the content, if you mean things like choosing what fonts to use when transforming it into a different rich text format. I was erroneously thinking he meant the structure of the document.