Markdown is not markup. It's in the name.
The point of markdown is to be readable by humans, using similar annotations that people have been using in ASCII text emails for decades.
The point of markdown is to be readable by humans, using similar annotations that people have been using in ASCII text emails for decades.
> Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. -- Wikipedia
> Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML). -- Gruber
Moreover, Markdown is constrained by the fact that it doesn't have a semantics, strictly speaking. It has a syntax, and that syntax is tied to the HTML canonical form of the document, which any valid Markdown file can be transformed into.
The fact that Markdown is written in extremely simple, easy to read (and brilliant IMO) syntax doesn't make it not markup.