[psytrx]

> I think it's eminently readable

This. And proper line breaks help a lot, too. There's a reason single line breaks are ignored.

> People have mentioned tables here, and...yeah, they're messy, ...

IIRC, the "original" markdown does not include tables. They've been added by GitHub (I think), because it made sense for them, and many parsers started to adopt. I agree they are not easily readable in "source mode". It helps to properly align stuff, though, but it's a PITA.

[Brendinooo]

Yeah. A lot of stuff was added later. The original spec was pretty loose, which is why CommonMark became a thing.

See

https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...

and linked previous blog posts if you (or anyone else reading this) are interested in the history.

[hunter2_]

> proper line breaks help a lot, too. There's a reason single line breaks are ignored.

Documents that don't hard-wrap (they could opt to hard-wrap without consequence, to your point), when viewed somewhere that doesn't make it trivial to engage soft-wrap, are much more of an issue than the tag barf mentioned earlier, IMHO.