> You'd change your mind about "everybody knows HTML" ...
Absolutely. You could've stopped there without any further caveats. The comment above I think is HN arrogance, assuming that the rest of the web is at a certain minimum level of tech literacy.
So many people post facebook updates or online comments and don't what what HTML is. I know someone (relatively young, uses the internet daily) who doesn't know what a browser is.
That aside, if given the choice, I would voluntarily use Markdown for comments all day long, no contest. For example a bullet/unordered list[1] needs so many awkward tags, whereas a Markdown list is much simpler, and much more intuitive for those who don't know HTML[2].
Well for reddit comments, the vast majority of the comments I typically make will make use of quotes, bold, italics or lists (the comments that include markdown), I use stuff like tables quite infrequently. So even remembering a small subset of the markdown will make my comments much more readable. I learn the features I use regularly, from reading other comments, that's how I picked up markdown originally.
I'm learning Python, I don't expect to learn all the features, hopefully I will learn a small subset, enough to be dangerous!
> Well, why not a WYSIWYG editor (similar to that on Stack Overflow) that generates HTML?
Absolutely, this is a good solution also. I personally like knowing the markdown features, I guess, but that's just me ;-) There is an extremely similar feature in the RES addon which allows live preview, not possible on a smaller screen though. It even includes a helpful list of markdown features for the newbie.
I don't know. Everybody knows HTML. It's pretty easy.
> If people input with HTML then you're going to need to filter which tags you do and don't want to pass through.
That's a solved problem¹²³.
> Markdown just gets rid of stuff like that.
And you can only use a subset of HTML. I guess there are pros and cons.
> Not to mention automatic paragraphing.
¹https://code.google.com/p/owasp-java-html-sanitizer/²https://github.com/rgrove/sanitize
³http://code.google.com/p/google-caja/wiki/JsHtmlSanitizer