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Comment by stormbrew | Hacker News Reader

HTML has only become well-specified recently in its entire history, and it's still riddled with archaic complexities from its time as something with very little rigid specification. I don't see how you can possibly point at HTML and call it the opposite of Markdown in that regard.

And let me tell you, HTML's early non-specificity did NOT cause people to follow the spirit of the law, nor did it make many people consider it usable and understandable by ordinary humans.

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You’re totally missing the point. HTML is a document language which is intended to be consumed by machines, whereas Markdown is designed to be good for humans to read directly.

If someone writes a Markdown document and it’s littered with complicated directives and tricky bits of syntax which rely on the specific implementation to work, but aren’t readable as plain text, then they’re not really following the spirit of Markdown.

By contrast, since HTML isn’t intended to be read directly, any hacky bit of markup, however awful it makes reading the raw file, is fair game as long as the browser output is pretty.

"HTML is a document language which is intended to be consumed by machines, whereas Markdown is designed to be good for humans to read directly."

AND intended to be consumed by machines.

For example. John Gruber's markdown perl script transforms his Markdown into HTML.

Although HTML was not meant to be read by the end user, many of the compromises it made from its parent, SGML, do seem to have been intended to make it more easily manipulated (as in both read and written by a somewhat technical human user). No unnamed close tags, extreme flexibility on presence or absence of opening and closing tags, case insensitivity, overlapping nesting, etc. All these things make things much harder for a computer to reliably process the document but theoretically much easier for a human to follow them. Of course, in the long run as these things pile up it actually ends up being counterproductive. It's just hard for both.

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