> Markdown was meant to be rendered, not left as plaintext
Now it’s not. Markdown was intend to be legible in plain text but visually emulate rendered text. The rendering stuff came later but even then it still had an emphasis on plain text readability.
There is a reason it was chosen for README, INSTALL etc documents in project repositories that are (or, at least until relatively recently in computing history, were) traditionally read in the command line.
> For months I’ve been working with John Gruber on a new project. The idea was to make writing simple web pages, and especially weblog entries, as easy as writing an email, by allowing you to use much the same syntax and converting it automatically into HTML.
Markdown is based on a really old nerd convention of stylising plain text. Things like /italics/ and *bold* predate MD by great many years. I was using some of markdown’s semantics even in the 90s.
This is what Aaron meant when he said:
> as easy as writing an email, by allowing you to use much the same syntax
…in that link you’ve posted.
Heck, even that quote token I used above (the greater than prefix) is a really old convention used in emails since probably before Aaron was even born.
It’s also worth noting that when markdown was released there were plenty of other plain text mark ups around (there’s some not even mentioned in that blog post too) but both Greg and Aaron point out that markdown is more readable in plain text and that’s a key decision behind it.
Now it’s not. Markdown was intend to be legible in plain text but visually emulate rendered text. The rendering stuff came later but even then it still had an emphasis on plain text readability.
There is a reason it was chosen for README, INSTALL etc documents in project repositories that are (or, at least until relatively recently in computing history, were) traditionally read in the command line.