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Honestly I don't really get why we don't have markdown everywhere. For adding italics, underscores, and other simple formatting I haven't found anything better

Honestly I don't really get why we don't have markdown everywhere. For adding italics, underscores, and other simple formatting I haven't found anything better. Once you get the hang of basic syntax, it becomes completely natural to just add some formatting while you're typing. Especially on a phone screen, just tossing in some * or _ is dead easy. People want to format their text. Markdown is easy to use and (AFAIK) not hard to implement. Why don't we have it everywhere?

chrismorgan 4y ago
Markdown is an unmitigated compatibility and extensibility disaster. It was designed as an authoring format, for which purpose it’s tolerable (though it’s still got major problems). But it was not designed as a publishing or general interchange format, and it’s completely unsuitable as either. (You start by saying, “when we say ‘Markdown’, what do we actually mean, technically? CommonMark? GitHub Flavoured Markdown? &c. &c.”) What this means is: sure, use Markdown within the scope of your app if you want to (compatibility and extensibility aren’t problems there), but at the protocol level, use something sane instead, like HTML with some kind of whitelist on supported elements and attributes (and yes, I will admit that HTML whitelist inconsistency is a problem too, but it’s by far the most convenient approach, and considerably wiser than using a format like RTF or Office Open XML or OpenDocument Text, and generally more sensible than designing a new minimal markup format from scratch).