Actually, this is related to a question I've thought about but never asked: if you're, say, writing a blog, why use Markdown over standard HTML? Does it give some advantage I'm not aware of?
You can write content faster if you're comfortable with the syntax. It also has the advantage of looking good unstyled and styled. The syntax tends to look like a styled plaintext email.
This. I use Markdown syntax when writing blog posts since Posterous formats Markdown just fine and it lets me view my writing (mostly) unstyled in vim, which I personally find much more comfortable than some web-based editor.
I do the same, though I guess this is more the fault of current web-based editors than of HTML itself.
I'm trying to explore some ideas of simplicity in browser-based HTML editing with Hallo (http://bergie.github.com/hallo/), but remains to be seen how well that works out. In the meanwhile there is always Markdown. And Vim.
It's striking to me that markdown has become so popular, when wysiwyg HTML editors have been around for a long time, and are supposed to be easier to use (I would expect them to be).
Perhaps it's partly that using asterisks for emphasis makes more intuitive sense than ^I or clicking a button etc; and partly that mostly people don't use it - let alone the more complex markdown features.
It's not that the WYSIWYG editors aren't easy to use in most senses–they're not difficult at all. However, many people that use Markdown are probably geeky enough to not need some WYSIWYG editor in the first place.
For me, I'm in the terminal and MacVim for a good portion of my day hacking around; so, while I enjoy portions of the Google Docs(or whatever editor) interface, if I stop my usual coding activities to write a blog post, I'd like to stay in my natural environment of vim and terminal. This is particularly true if my blog post contains code–it feels much more natural for me to paste code samples between vim windows than it does to copy code from vim and paste it into some external editor.
(So, basically, it's not just the syntax, it's also the environment in which I get to write that syntax.)
The biggest advantage for Markdown is that it is in plain text. It looks good in plain text. This makes it incredibly portable, lets me write it in whatever text editor I have at hand (even ssh'd into another machine (though I don't do that very often, everything I write is just in dropbox)). I prefer having my writing sitting on my machine in straight forward plain text formats rather than in HTML. It is so much easier to deal with this way, and it is a one step process to convert it to HTML when I want to post it online. Plus, if I want to convert it to some other format, it would be trivial to do so.
Ah. Interesting. I use macros in Textmate and Typinator to accomplish more or less the same thing; for example, command-shift-v will enter "<a href=command-v">, with command-v being paste, and command-i will yield italics, and so forth. Still, having something universal, like Markdown, sounds attractive.
