Which is fitting. It evolved long before the term 'markdown' itself existed, a practice having been used in email and usenet and BBSes for many years before. The 'spec' is just trying to codify the already-existing usage, which evolved organically in many different areas by many different people.
>You need to use a WYSIWYG tool or you don’t use it.
No, no you absolutely don't. Almost no one uses a WYSIWYG for markdown. That would completely negate the point.
>anyone who writes Markdown regularly using a WYSIWYG editor or an IDE already, so the whole ‘plain text’ thing doesn’t matter.
Probably 99% wrong. I've never met anyone that chose to make things more difficult for themselves by using a clunky WYSIWYG instead of just typing the markdown in a text editor. Sometimes that's an IDE, but that's beside the point. Plain text does matter.
>Markdown will never get beyond developers.
Gonna have to go way back in time and alter history in order to change that. Like, before HTML or the web. It was used by everyone, certainly not just developers.
I thought this must've been written by someone very young who never even saw the internet or tech until a few years ago. Yet the author claims to have become a programmer in the mid-1990s and somehow still doesn't understand the concept of plain text or how the internet developed, and how markdown came about - that is a little baffling.