> The big thing for me is that Markdown is not just quick to touch-type but also is easy to read in plain text documents. I can easily infer what the formatting

> The big thing for me is that Markdown is not just quick to touch-type but also is easy to read in plain text documents. I can easily infer what the formatting means when reading Markdown even without learning it. And this is the whole point of markdown. It’s for the source version to accurately represent what the output document would show. So emphasis isn’t just a tag. It’s represented by surrounding text with *s, which shows emphasis even in the source document. A URL is easy once you understand that you read the stuff in the [] and mentally ignore the stuff in (). The point of markdown is not to transform it into HTML. The point of Markdown is to be able to write a plain text document which is sufficient on its own. The fact that it can be transformed into an HTML output is a bonus (although a planned one). In a sense this idea is conveyed in the name itself. It’s the opposite of markup, in that the markup symbols aren’t intended to be separate from the content but are part of the content itself.