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Call me crazy but I still can't see what all the hype is with Markdown, BBcode, and all these other formatting languages that come out every few years. What ever was wrong with just defining and using a subset of HTML?

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Markdown and its kin are easier to read raw. Surrounding underscores, for example, break flow much less than <b> tags.

Interesting. Perhaps readability-wise yes, but in terms of actually writing it, I always find myself googling Markdown cheatsheets because I can't remember for the life of me whether single-asterisk or double-asterisk is bold or italic (the HTML counterparts are hard to screw up), and what the assortment of other symbols do. Like, my brain's parser wants to explode.

Also, * in Markdown appears to map to HTML <b>, </b>, and <li> and this drives me nuts, especially when these have to be used together.

You can produce <li> with ‘-’ instead of ‘*’. ‘-’ has no other meaning.

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