Markdown, Markdown, is nothing to do with email and Usenet formatting. It was a specific syntax, poorly defined, which has since become a broad family of mostly similar syntaxes; and it was inspired by various conventions from things like email and Usenet, some of which predate computers (e.g. pretty sure I’ve seen or heard of asterisks being used for italics in old typewritten stuff); but Markdown is all about HTML, its syntax is extremely constrained by HTML, and any attempts to separate it from HTML are fairly thoroughly doomed.
Saying that it has nothing to do with email/usenet is a bridge too far in the other direction, it was very much inspired by such formatting, something it never hid: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
> the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email
Yeah, it was inspired by those things, as I said, but it was never connected to them, and is quite incompatible with them.
I also express things that strongly because I’ve observed a distinct tendency to interpret Markdown as the successor of those things or the inventor of such syntax ideas. Whereas in fact, Markdown was not the first lightweight markup language, and is not the only one, and isn’t even the LML unquestionably closest to plaintext email conventions (reStructuredText is an obvious contender; overall, I’d consider reStructuredText a little closer than Markdown, but it’s subjective).
Perhaps my intent would be more clearly expressed by inverting it: email formatting has nothing to do with Markdown.
