I think he understands it pretty well. Implicitly, explicitly, however you like. It’s a PERL script that has been reimplemented a hundred different ways. “Read”

I think he understands it pretty well. Implicitly, explicitly, however you like. It’s a PERL script that has been reimplemented a hundred different ways. “Read” in this instance means as a writer reviewing his own writing, not as the final output. You can pull up any individual Daring Fireball article and append .text to the URL to read the Markdown source, but you don’t necessarily want to read Daring Fireball (or anything) like that. Similarly, I think Markdown gets misused in a lot of places it doesn’t really belong. It’s handy, sure, but there’s also nothing wrong with just making a good WYSIWIG editor for people rather than telling them they have to use Markdown. That’s just my opinion, but Gruber has expressed similar opinions elsewhere.