> Developers never look beyond Markdown when writing documentation or articles and are thus blissly unaware of the much richer writing possibilties of using HTML (which is simple to learn, unlike CSS).
HTML is wolf in sheep's clothing though. It's deceptively simple to learn the basics, but the nested nature of it is something that will allow one to shoot their semantical or representational foot off, even before trying to apply CSS. Take, for example, humble P tag. The thing that trips up most people, for example, is that ideally you'd need to contain text blocks in paragraphs, not just have it free floating in the document. In theory. P tag is simple. Except that end tag is optional. When writing HTML, that is. But not always, as per standard:
"A P element's end tag can be omitted if the p element is immediately followed by an address, article, aside, blockquote, details, div, dl, fieldset, figcaption, figure, footer, form, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, header, hgroup, hr, main, menu, nav, ol, p, pre, section, table, or ul element, or if there is no more content in the parent element and the parent element is an HTML element that is not an a, audio, del, ins, map, noscript, or video element, or an autonomous custom element."
But in XHTML end tag is always required. And you shouldn't have block level elements like images within P. And you can't nest them. When outputting DIV with a block of text that DIV should contain a P, not just text. DIV's are cool, you can nest DIVs. And they need end tag. Simple? Well:
"Authors are strongly encouraged to view the div element as an element of last resort, for when no other element is suitable. Use of more appropriate elements instead of the div element leads to better accessibility for readers and easier maintainability for authors."
But who does that nowadays? It's DIVs all the way down usually.
So no, HTML is not simple.
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/