I agree with you in principle -- the "web sites should never do things like choose their own typefaces, line lengths and line spacing" crowd always makes me sigh.
However.
We're not talking about web sites here, we're talking about README files. They should be absolutely readable and understandable if you're displaying them in a console -- that's arguably one of the underlying tenets of Markdown as it was originally conceived (e.g., that its source be as easily readable as a plain text email or Usenet message is). I like that GitHub renders Markdown documents, but a lot of time when you're mucking around with source, you're looking at, well, the plain document.
I think this is a fun hack to demonstrate how you can do ridiculous things in technically-still-Markdown documents, but it's unequivocally not something anyone should actually do in their Markdown documents. :)
However.
We're not talking about web sites here, we're talking about README files. They should be absolutely readable and understandable if you're displaying them in a console -- that's arguably one of the underlying tenets of Markdown as it was originally conceived (e.g., that its source be as easily readable as a plain text email or Usenet message is). I like that GitHub renders Markdown documents, but a lot of time when you're mucking around with source, you're looking at, well, the plain document.
I think this is a fun hack to demonstrate how you can do ridiculous things in technically-still-Markdown documents, but it's unequivocally not something anyone should actually do in their Markdown documents. :)