Depends entirely on the website.

Hacker News could probably expect a large majority of their users to be able to handle it. Maybe with complaints, but handle it.

I had a personal Wiki which was based off of some open source Wiki. The first thing I did was removed Markdown, because it was completely pointless for me. This was 14 years ago. All I wanted was a web interface to edit HTML and view it later. For the most part, I just had lists and links, and sometimes notes and status reports.

Mainly, I could go to localhost/psychometry in my browser bar, and get immediately presented with "This page doesn't exist, type in the textbox below to write the HTML for the page". It was super handy.

Markdown was invented 10 years ago[0]. Don't know what you where using at the time, but it wasn't (exactly) markdown.

[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown

markdown was _released_ 10 years ago, that's true.

but it's not entirely accurate to say it was "invented".

let me be more clear: markdown was _not_ "invented".

gruber was blogging with movable type, which was using the _textile_ light-markup system created by dean allen.

so he didn't even come up with the _idea_ himself!

of course, neither did allen. light-markup systems were _the_zeitgeist_ around the turn of the century:

* restructured-text was adopted for python documentation.

(.rst -wikipedia.org/wiki/restructuredtext -- david goodger)

* asciidoc had a big list of org-users. (still does.)

(asciidoc -- wikipedia.org/wiki/asciidoc -- stuart rackham)

* and there were other early entrants that are still alive.

(txt2tags -- wikipedia.org/wiki/txt2tags -- txt2tags team)

and dean allen's textile had a fairly solid reach by 2004:

* textile -- wikipedia.org/wiki/textpattern -- dean allen

* texy -- code.google.com/p/texy-- david grudl

* redcloth -- rubygems.org/gems/RedCloth/versions -- garber

* textpattern -- textpattern.com -- dean allen

but the first that i'd call "light markup" was "setext":

* 1992 -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/setext -- ian feldman

"setext" was short for "structured e-text", and yes, that's why "restructured-text" put the "re" in front of its name, because they were "redoing" the structured-e-text of setext.

but even ian feldman would tell you (if you could find him) that he was merely leveraging the well-known conventions of the fledging internet at the time, such as usenet listserves.

"light-markup" is something that _the_masses_ "invented".

-bowerbird

Hmm, it was some C++ code someone had made based off of MoinMoin, and it had something like Markdown. Specifically camel-casing being automatic links, I remember wanting to get rid of.