"The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions."

Ha! I've never read that, but having used Markdown quite a bit, they have entirely failed that goal. A Markdown document is parsable by a human, but it still looks like content surrounded by tag barf that failed to render.