> a) markdown isn't expressive enough. In fact it's pretty horrendous to edit and separate content and layout IMHO. I'd go as far to say I prefer docbook over markdown. It's fine for github readme's but not typesetting.
I think they're all pretty poor. Sure they're a reasonable choice for conversion to HTML but they're only a subset of that and HTML is pretty easy to write and separate style and content these days.
The point of these compile-to-html languages (eg. markdown) is that you're abstracting away from the display formatting as much as possible.
It's easy to say that you can just use HTML as content-only and style it using CSS, but the reality is that HTML is primarily a display format; it's pretty much unavoidable having classes, ids & DOM node structure in HTML that govern display behavior.
By abstracting concepts (paragraph, heading, list, etc) out, you can render them as components however you like into the HTML. Which means if you decide to change how they're rendered, you can do it all at once by editing the template.
Markdown & it's kin are certainly not perfect, but I'm pretty sure writing directly into HTML for your content is a generally really terrible idea.
(that said, with web components we will be able to do this directly in HTML by creating custom data-driven tags, so maybe that's the future. ...but it's not quite here yet)
Show me the part of Markdown (and its kin) that allows me to distinguish why the text is appearing in (or, rather, marked up in a manner that normally translates to) italics or bold (hint: you can't assume stress, and simply holding to current conventins is only good for ephemera). Where do the language tags for foreign words and phrases go? Are asides, callouts and infoboxes really the same things as blockquotes? HTML may not quite be SGML, but it is an awful lot richer than Markdown (and its kin) even if no attention is paid to styling. (I haven't used a class or id whose only purpose was styling in a decade. They either have a relationship to the document structure or they don't exist.)
True but I listed two options available which aren't as bad as Markdown. There isn't even one Markdown but several extensions as far as I can see and Markdown looks like a proof of concept sent to production and later extended at various customer sites.
More people should understand this before suggesting Markdown as a solution. For a better experience on github or bitbucket you can use reStructuredText and Org-mode. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language#Co...