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> only a small subset of html's features.

On the contrary - Markdown is essentially a superset of HTML, so unless you're using a renderer that strips it from the input, you can have the best of both worlds.

This property was super useful for a lightweight CMS I threw together a few years and which is still used by the original customer today. 99% of what they need to render is easily authored in Markdown, and this further helps ensure a commonality of style and device portability.



The original markdown parser supported html because it was basically just a preprocessor that added some syntactic sugar to html. The proposal here isn't just "what if browsers had a markdown preprocessor" (although I also think that would be questionable), but "what if browsers limited content down to only markdown, so that the web was all just clean, style-agnostic documents," and that clearly requires that markdown not support arbitrary html.


Having re-read the article, i must say that this is another incorrect claim. It proposes no such thing. This is one straw man after another.

All it actually suggests is this:

> Let's have markdown rendering in all major browsers soon


That would be the worst world. I love that we have semantic and accessible elements and Markdown is pretty bad in both those categories.


Flavors of Markdown might be a superset, but as it is normally used, I don't think many would say that Markdown has all the abilities of HTML.


The original Markdown spec is very clear that HTML is allowed. So MD itself is absolutely a superset of HTML

https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html

But in practice people mostly use MD variants, such as the "GitHub Flavored Markdown Spec" which may have some limits on HTML usage

https://github.github.com/gfm/#html-blocks




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