Markdown’s popularity seems to stem from its simplicity. Complicating the base standard may hurt more than help, as tools that only need the basics (what it was designed for) would be pressured into full support of a complex standard.

It’s one thing for an app to create scope creep for markdown that those users can leverage. It’s another thing for the standard to create the scope creep, which is then pushed onto all the apps that may use it.

At some point, markdown loses its human readability when too many features are added. So if it gets too complicated, someone will inevitably create a new more simple standard… or push something like “markdown classic”.

John Gruber, who created markdown, doesn’t even use it for all the stuff most others do today.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/04/apple-notes-mar...