HTML Should Support Markdown. Seriously.

Markdown has massive adoption. It clearly meets a need. The cost of HTML's power is verbosity, and sometimes that's the wrong tradeoff:

• More typing. Writing HTML is slow.
• More visual noise. Reading HTML is hard.

Browsers should support Markdown natively. The syntax should be part of HTML. There should be no need for a shim to translate.

This is very practical:

• There is no Markdown syntax that can't be represented in HTML.
• Markdown-to-HTML conversion is easy to implement.
• Security risks are low.

The only non-trivial task is enabling CSS, which would require a canonical DOM representation of Markdown.

To the standards-mobile! This is a task for the HTML WG. I searched the mailing list and (surprizingly) didn't find discussion.

If you like this idea, all you have to do is discuss it in social media:

• HN
• Twitter
• GitHub