[bowerbird]

i think most people will tell you that it _is_ easier.

first, it's one character, as opposed to three or four. and, as you get into longer tags, like "em" or "strong", so grows the amount of excess typing you'll need to do. (i won't mention "blockquote", but you know that i could!)

second, it's the _same_ on both sides, not different. and there's no question about the direction of a slash, which is not intuitive to people who don't code .html.

third, let us recall that some structures, like lists, need internal "li/li" tag-pairs on each individual item, as well as the "ul/ul" tag-pair located on the outside.

fourth, all the brackets/tags are intrusive when editing. your mind has to "look past" the markup to see the text, and those distractions make writing more difficult than it already is, and there's no reason to put up with that.

fifth, the distraction gets even worse if you want to have curly-quotes, because there's crap like “this”; and let’s all agree we don’t need that garbage!

sixth, .html can get downright complicated, very quickly. can you tell me how "pre", "code", and "keyboard" differ? probably not, not just off the top of your head, anyway... and what's the abbreviation tag again? i always forget it.

and seventh, you mean i have to put a "p" tag on _every_ paragraph? _every_ one? can't it just do _that_ for me? it's pretty obvious that blank line means "new paragraph". i mean, seriously, sometimes computers are _so_stupid!_

so, um, yeah, actually, light-markup is a _lot_ easier.

still... if _you_ prefer to write in .html, be my guest!

but me? well, i've got way more important things to do.

-bowerbird

[VikingCoder]

Picture a WYSIWYG or maybe a preview-below editor, much like the Stack Exchange ones, but outputting HTML behind the scenes rather than markup.

Now there's no character to type for italics, you highlight what you want in italics, and push the button. Or type Control-I. <i> and </i> magically appear. Pretty soon, you might even learn what they mean.

A "make bullet" or "make numbered" list button. An indent/unindent button. Much like GMail Compose or Google Drive.

Most of the time, people don't bother with even Markup. All those asterisks and double-asterisks. Many people just post links, rather than that paren / brace stuff like on Reddit.

Yes, HTML can get downright complicated. The vast majority of the time, people don't even Markup.

As for p tags, the site could have white-space: pre-wrap style applied to all comments. Boom.

And again, markup is nice and all. So is Notepad. But I like HTML, and I like IDEs.

And to be clear, I'm not saying a site would allow all HTML tags (that would be suicide with the first <script>), but would whitelist them. Then, there's no CPU time to render Markup into HTML. So, there's that.