You can look at markdown et al. from another point of view: it's a file format that is human readable (text) and therefore "safe". Many people care more about

You can look at markdown et al. from another point of view: it's a file format that is human readable (text) and therefore "safe". Many people care more about rendered markdown than about raw markdown, and would prefer to edit closer to the rendered result than to the human readable but not what they're interested in text. For those people, this eliminates the "write - render - check" cycle.