I should probably point out before someone else does, that my own blog, hackensplat.com, is one of those very websites I'm complaining about. In my defence, its

I should probably point out before someone else does, that my own blog, hackensplat.com, is one of those very websites I'm complaining about. In my defence, its just a blogger.com hosted site and I'm using their comment system. I want forms to either accept plain text and allow angle brackets and stars, or accept HTML and provide an interface that hides the HTML tags. We only need Markdown and their ilk for the last generation of websites (including mine) that are behind the times.