If we're chasing the canonical rabbit, Markdown wasn't designed for any specific purpose. It was designed upon a core principle: that Markdown's syntax should b

If we're chasing the canonical rabbit, Markdown wasn't designed for any specific purpose. It was designed upon a core principle: that Markdown's syntax should be as readable as possible. That is, Markdown should be readable before it has been converted to any specific machine-readable format. Straight from the author: > The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email. http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/