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I was following the Random Links from somewhere and stumbled on
The comment that triggered a response was:
For the unaffiliated, markdown's entire reason for existence is for nothing other than… rendering to HTML.
It has literally no other purpose in existence.
Oddly, we use Markdown to generate HTML too. As well as Microsoft Word ".docx" files, LibreOffice ".odt" files, PDFs, and ePub eBooks. So the critique seemed more than a bit naive.
Modern markdown processors recognize markup well beyond Gruber's original standard. They include ways to "style" outputs in various formats (CSS and templating). And many things that address most writing/publishing needs outside the formal media. Academic publishing is well supported.
I've demonstrated Markdown to `man` pages and the output is indistinguishable from the old fashioned way. And the input is not littered with "dot-commands" and line breaks that take away from the author's reading comprehension. I gave up "dot-commands" in the early 1980s after nearly a decade of them doing IBM documentation. The Markdown markup is distracting but not like that for `groff` and other such.
So, go look at the work being done. My favorite is `pandoc` and I use it daily. It doesn't do GemText in or out and I'm too lazy to write the custom Reader/Writer but the Lua interface makes that pretty doable.
As an adherent of The Typewriter Manifesto, Markdown gets us back towards "Just Writing".