More about MarkUp, Down, and Round and Round

I'm becoming increasingly suspicious of the MarkDown school of thought that says that we need to use ordinary characters to mark up text with formatting information. I think it came about in the time when all we had was plain-text editing — WardsWiki , early email and similar — so actual richer-text was simply not even an option. But now? I mean, YES, we need to agree on serialisation of such bits…