> It is missing the #1 reason I like it though - it's fundamentally text.

Sure, but that's table stakes.

There are much better formats: AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, etc. Yet I also primarily use Markdown. I could use a format that's perhaps 20% better, and well-specified. But I'd have to use Markdown somewhere anyway. So I just stick with Markdown. It's good enough for me.

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thangalin 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Can you quantify "much better"? I compiled a set of over 70 features offered by a variety of plain text formats:

https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/09/08/feature-matrix/

Are many features missing from the list? From what I can tell, objectively, plain text formats offer largely equivalent functionality.

	▲	Linux-Fan 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The original Markdown has fewer features than listed for the more advanced formats in the table. Hence if someone uses reStructuredText it is more precise than just saying “Markdown” because Markown could refer to anything from the original minimalist featureset to the vastly extended format supported by pandoc if given the appropriate CLI arguments. Some text-based formats have more options for tables e.g. alignment of columns (it may help with numbers to right-align them) or multirow/multicolumn options. Some formats support definition lists (corresponds to <dl> in HTML) - a feature which I often find valuable but was not included in the original Markdown IIRC. One advantage of using a text-based format is that it can be exported to either LaTeX or HTML and Markdown seems to prefer the HTML output by explicitly supporting inline HTML as an escape hatch for more complex constructs (e.g. tables with rowspan/colspan). In addition to often not being supported for a non-HTML export-type it also hurts the WYSIWYG experience when reading the file like plain text.