Why Is Markdown Popular?

The best option there is to simply help them and correct their output (again and again); there is no technological silver bullet to solve it.

Newlines in Markdown are pretty weirdly implemented, certainly! The canonical markup seems to be to make paragraphs by having two newlines (which all tools do), and to have an actual newline within a paragraph by ending the preceding sentence with two spaces and a newline. I'd love it if all tools did that, but an argument raised on the issue tracker of one of these (CodiMD) was that moving to the correct behaviour would break many existing documents where people had gotten used to lines breaking at the presence of just a single newline.

The big thing for me is that Markdown is not just quick to touch-type but also is easy to read in plain text documents. I can easily infer what the formatting means when reading Markdown even without learning it.

I'd be happy with another plain text ASCII format but Mardown just happens to be the one that's been widely adopted.

Being able to keep documents in the same version control system as your code is also a useful tool IMHO. I hate it when management insists on keeping documentation in something like Confluence. If checkout an old version of the code I want a matching old version of the documentation from that time.

Not only is this probably incorrect; but even if it were the case, then:

- so what?

- doesn't this contradict the title lamenting the popularity of markdown?

Even things like Twine (interactive fiction text adventures) have a Markdown-like syntax.

Anyway, Markdown emerged out of the Ruby community. So it's not strange that there is no specification. Ruby is a dynamically typed language so, ruby programmers tend to not specify a lot of things like types or schemas. And indeed the Ruby language it self is a bit under-specified. The spec is simply "whatever ruby does is what it does", which sucks for alternate implementations like JRuby. The same is true for Markdown. Whatever the original markdown library does was the spec. And it has since been loosely implemented by others doing their own Markdown derivatives. Like the widely used Github flavor. Which is also a ruby based implementation, I think. So it is similarly under specified.

However, the lack of a specification is not much of an issue since markdown is used by humans to be turned into something human readable with some html formatting. Either it's readable or you fix it. And it's simple enough that any markup typos in markdown are usually not that big of a deal. The main goal of Markdown is to get out of the user's way so they can focus on content rather than formatting.

As for editors. There are plenty of editors that support markdown. Many of them even have live previews. So, it's great for that.