> I mean, does somebody really compose text in html?! Yes. I use HTML the way people use markdown: as an open, easy to read, easy to write, plain text format

> I mean, does somebody really compose text in html?! Yes. I use HTML the way people use markdown: as an open, easy to read, easy to write, plain text format for taking notes, writing articles, etc. I find this quite intuitive and easy – partly because I’m an old-school web-developer from days of yore and I have HTML deeply internalised; partly because I use the abbreviated version of HTML noted above; and partly because I use a VIM plugin called Emmet which allows you to construct complex HTML fragments with a basic shorthand. The reason why I use HTML instead of markdown is threefold. * The first is that simple HTML, written with a little care, is readable as-is, and requires no transformation to see it looking pretty (just open in a browser). Markdown requires pandoc to turn it into something else. * The second is that it is a semantically rich language, full of useful tags for expressing document structure and context for words and sentences. I find Markdown really confining. * The third reason is that, if I take the care to fill in the basic author/keyword/desc meta-tags I can run scripts over my directories looking for and indexing things. Who cares Search Engines don’t use some of those tags anymore. I do. Possibly they’re not entirely compelling reasons for anyone else to adopt HTML over markdown, but they work for me.