If you think about it in terms of syntax, then sure. Markdown is a superset of HTML. I think it's much more meaningful to compare their semantics instead. From

If you think about it in terms of syntax, then sure. Markdown is a superset of HTML. I think it's much more meaningful to compare their semantics instead. From that point of view, Markdown is a nicer, more human-readable syntax for a very small subset of html, plus an escape hatch to reach the rest of HTML using conventional syntax.