commonmark-spec

case, why not Setext, which is from 1991? I'll tell you why, because Markdown was meant to codify already in use norms, and to emphasize readability over all else: Readability, however, is emphasized above all else. 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 — including Setext, atx, Textile, reStructuredText, Grutatext, and EtText — the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email. To this end, Markdown’s syntax is comprised entirely of punctuation characters, which punctuation characters have been carefully chosen so as to look like what they mean. E.g., asterisks around a word actually look like emphasis. Markdown lists look like, well, lists. Even blockquotes look like quoted passages of text, assuming you’ve ever used email. - Markdown Syntax "Daring Fireball – Markdown – Syntax. 2013-06-13.[3] > those subsets would've been just as "simple" to learn I think not. For some, including me, markdown was almost zero-cost. It's how I wrote email. > but the blogosphere thought it was hot shit back then, and took great delight in pushing things viral. ergo markdown. I think that's highly simplistic, and ignores the realities. One of which is that it was pushed on Reddit, which has become one of the largest and most used sites on the internet. I find it hard to believe the blogospere opining on it (because it's not actually used on all that many blogs) has had more sway than them on this topic. 1: http://commonmark.org 2: https://github.com/jgm/CommonMark/wiki/Deployed-Extensions 3: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#philosoph...