[return_to_monke]

The point of markdown is that it is human-readable not only in "rendered" html form, but plain text too.

I think this explains the lack of viewers; they are simply not needed.

[eviks]

That doesn't explain it since that point is theoretical, in reality markdown is poorly readable even for the basics (table with a few bold red words in a cell easily breaks alignment / readability)

(also seeing all those marks isn't aesthetically good, hence the need for a viewer)

[VerifiedReports]

No, it doesn't. First, I don't know what you mean by "HTML form." It's not HTML at all.

Second: If the formatting codes are going to be ignored by all the viewing applications, why are they in the document in the first place?

Every time this comes up, someone floats this weird "but all you need is a text viewer" argument... indicating that Markdown is pointless.