The paucity of imagination in this post is depressing. Markdown isn't the future, it's the past. I mean that literally - markdown is a formalization of a set of

The paucity of imagination in this post is depressing. Markdown isn't the future, it's the past. I mean that literally - markdown is a formalization of a set of kludges to approximate formatting when using the technology of 1970s dumb terminals. Is that really the best writing system we can come up with? Clearly, it's not. One obvious improvement would be a system with the same semantics as markdown which presented these semantics using the standard typographical conventions everyone knows (italic for emphasis, larger text for headings, etc). A further improvement would be a more carefully thought through and richer semantics than the rather arbitrarily-chosen subset of HTML that markdown currently supports.