My beef with Markdown (and Textile and any of the other current markup formats) is that it is geared towards technical people. Non-techies have problems rememb

My beef with Markdown (and Textile and any of the other current markup formats) is that it is geared towards technical people. Non-techies have problems remembering the format, and with typing it correctly, and many will never realize (or bother to look into) that there is a format, even if you provide helper toolbars and prominent links to help pages. One of our current sites uses Textile because it started up long before Markdown existed. Textile is much worse that Markdown. For example, a single starting space means <pre>. And the link syntax is awful. People understand "" and "_" very well. Bullets are fairly intuitive. Everything else requires looking at the format code help sheet. My suggestion for a better link syntax is this: Anchor in brackets before or* after the link. So this: [Some link] http://example.com/ and this: http://example.com/ [Some link] would both become a link with "Some link" as the text. If there are brackets-text both before and after, choose the one after. This is unambiguous for almost all kinds of text, and anyone who is oblivious to the syntax is unlikely to stumble into it by mistake. And it's quite easy to remember, especially since the order is unimportant. You don't need much more than that, because people who really care about formatting are also capable of learning HTML. I see plenty of non-tech people -- many of them writers and journalists, but also non-professionals -- who have learned the basics of HTML because they are really punctilious about formatting and the aesthetics of text.