Why can't web browsers render basic markdown natively (no plugins)? Wouldn't that be a much simpler and more secure parser than HTML?
A Markdown Web would look like the early Web.
A Markdown Web would look like the early Web.
So they could but... why should they?
> Wouldn't that be a much simpler and more secure parser than HTML?
No, because Markdown allows for raw HTML, so a compliant Markdown parser must also include a complete HTML parser.
<div markup="markdown">Browser now _interprets_ content as markdown until end of div.</div>
It would make user-submitted content so much better since you could just directly embed bbcode, markdown, etc. without needing to parse it to html or validate that their submission is valid html/only using approved tags, etc.
Why don't they? Coordination is costly.