The difference is 30 years of websites and tools being built on HTML. There's an opportunity cost to consider: is formatting simple websites in Markdown and ren

The difference is 30 years of websites and tools being built on HTML. There's an opportunity cost to consider: is formatting simple websites in Markdown and rendering them natively that much more valuable than simply writing them in HTML or using a Markdown-to-HTML tool that it's worth the cost of creating standards, implementing them in browsers, etc. as opposed to putting those efforts elsewhere? If you were starting from scratch, maybe. But it seems like we've already reached a point where existing solutions for Markdown-to-HTML get you almost all of the value and none of the cost.