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It really would be nice to have a convenient renderer for it though. It's genuinely surprising something like firefox doesn't have a markdown reader builtin already.

I wrote one for my own use (on Linux): https://github.com/mvz/mdv

If you’re on a Mac, I recommend qlmarkdown. It’s a customizable quick look renderer for markdown (md) files.

https://github.com/sbarex/QLMarkdown

Then that's no point at all. You're not seeing the formatting that the embedded formatting characters call for, so why have them in there?

and it looks like poo, that’s the other point

Exactly. You can always count on someone to come back with, "That's why it's so great! You just read it in a plain-text editor!"

Why does anyone have to point out how dumb it is to litter your "plain text" file with formatting characters that are never respected?