Can someone explain to me the recent explosion in support of Markdown in Mac and iOS applications (such as the Day One journaling app for Mac and iOS)? Are that many people really clamoring for a text syntax to mark up text for transformation later into a rich text format? I’m serious here. I know the 5by5.tv podcast crowd seems to adore it but they’re power users. Are normal people really looking for a way to move text among platforms like Mac apps and blogs? I’ve experimented with it before but I just don’t understand the allure as it makes regular text harder to read and takes me out of getting words on the page into worrying about markup(down).

I guess it’s not a big deal to add support for it but it seems like an odd feature to me to tout as a major feature. Most people simply aren’t going to know or care. And no offense to Markdown but Textile syntax is better