Hah, I was about to criticise the text for far too lightly conflating markup and punctuation, just to see the afterword.

I actually do think the author has a point, in that must solutions today are inelegant, I also don't think this is a problem which has a real elegant solution. Where to draw the line? Why not encode fonts into the standard too, if we're doing bold? Etc.

I'm still mostly in favour of keeping everything markdown (in my own writing), however much it pollutes the "purity" of text.