In reply to Mark k..

I disagree. Markdown was designed from the ground up to be convenient to write in a plain-text editor, whereas html was not. Typing open and close tags, for example, quickly becomes strenuous (with or without autocomplete / auto-close-tag-inserting). Markdown also gracefully handles syntax errors - you won't be stumbling upon some ugly unfinished html code or, worse, breaking the output rendering. And its semantics are designed to correlate visually, so it's easier to get the flow of your output simply by looking over the document. It's much harder to get the feel for the end product with html.