> Thus, “Markdown” is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML.
I believe nowadays most people refer to (1) instead of Perl tool, when talking about Markdown.
Personally I use Markdown *a lot* for Flutter apps, where text is rendered natively. Also use it for legal documents, which are converted to PDF via pandoc. Another project I have is a console app that also shows formatted help text written in Markdown. In all these cases there is no HTML whatsoever and no 'text-to-HTML conversion tool'. Yet it's all Markdown, so no need to reduce its applications to HTML, let alone claiming that it's designed "to transform to HTML".
I believe nowadays most people refer to (1) instead of Perl tool, when talking about Markdown.
Personally I use Markdown *a lot* for Flutter apps, where text is rendered natively. Also use it for legal documents, which are converted to PDF via pandoc. Another project I have is a console app that also shows formatted help text written in Markdown. In all these cases there is no HTML whatsoever and no 'text-to-HTML conversion tool'. Yet it's all Markdown, so no need to reduce its applications to HTML, let alone claiming that it's designed "to transform to HTML".