Why Is Markdown Popular?

Because rich text in general is just a minefield.

Just get into copy pasting stuff from word to some browser rich text field - people will expect it works flawlessly but I know it will break in dozen different ways.

Problem is not with markdown - problem is with rich text in general.

Markdown is useful as it limits the options to make stuff easier. Argument that you need post process it to be useful is not that good - because that is the point of markdown you have "raw" data that is easy to post process any way you want. If you need some really fancy embeds and changes then maybe it is just not the right tool?

I don't use tables in markdown (besides maybe 3-rows 3-columns) but if you need more you probably should just stick with word/excel. I don't see a way to make tables in ASCII/UTF that would not suck.

> Markdown emerged out of the Ruby community.

The reference implementation was in Perl, not Ruby.

I think the author is missing a fairly major point, that Markdown was intended to be a way to process text written the way people already wrote it.

ASCII is absolutely the best way to write documents, if you're working in a primarily ASCII environment. Crabbit old bastards like me who remember the dialup BBS days consider Markdown-like text to be standard - underline things with a row of hyphens, mark a heading by underlining with # symbols or = symbols depending on how "strong" you want the heading to be, emphasis words with *asterisks like this* and italicise with /slashes like this/ (okay they got that one a bit wrong but still the point stands). Make a bulleted list by indenting a bit and putting a * at the start of the line, and so on.

Before Markdown-the-specification and set of libraries to transform text to HTML existed, there were already a wealth of documents in somewhat Markdown-like syntax. Being able to transform them into something that "kids these days" with their high-resolution 800x600 pixel bitmap displays can view in a cool font came long after.

The author clearly doesn't understand the appeal of it.

Some of the points don't make sense. For example, he says it separates the design from the content. Er, no, it doesn't. It puts the design in the content, but in a human readable and writable way, like an old type-written document.

The chief selling point of markdown for me is I can write simple, portable and usually short documents which can be easily read and edited in a text editor, and that you can put under version control. And you can transform it into other rich text formats if you want a pretty document too. In that sense, it's a bit like LaTex, but not as hard to understand or use.

I would agree that the lack of standardisation is a problem, and that doing complicated things in it starts losing the benefit. But for simple documents it's just great.

Edit: I guess it does separate the design from the content, if you mean things like choosing what fonts to use when transforming it into a different rich text format. I was erroneously thinking he meant the structure of the document.

This wikipedia page includes reference to WhatsApp... Should it?

I understand that you can use bold, italic, underline, but that is where the comparison ends - the answer to Features is "No" in the comparison table versus others. Not all other comparisons include it.

It's almost as if someone shoe-horned it in for greater visibility. "Hey look at our app, it's better than competitors because it's listed here!" Yet it's competitors offer the same or more.