> HTML cruft, like <span id="486uw3y3"> crept into the source, often from authors pasting HTML from another rich editing environment into the MDN WYSIWYG editor

> HTML cruft, like <span id="486uw3y3"> crept into the source, often from authors pasting HTML from another rich editing environment into the MDN WYSIWYG editor That's a problem with a bad WYSIWYG editor, not HTML in general. > authors were faced with the result of 15 years of people pasting rich content into the WYSIWYG editor, resulting in [a ton of garbled HTML markup] ... But you could have cleaned up the HTML. > The beauty of Markdown, to you as a writer, is that it lets you concentrate on expressing concepts and hardly thinking about syntax at all. I entirely disagree because there are few WYSIWYG editors for it and almost certainly not for "that one non-standard extension" everyone adds to their flavor. I'll give them that HTML particularly sucks for code examples, which is a very good reason to switch, but the comparison in the article is not a very fair one - it's bungled HTML vs Markdown.