Dumbdown is more keystrokes and the formatting gets in the way of readability.
I try to be positive in all Show HN posts - but I'm having trouble finding something good to say about this.
Inline HTML is great for internal usage and pure peer relationships.
It's a nonstarter when you're in a situation where you have contributions who are only partially invested or only pretending to be. In a work environment, the threat of ostracism has many more teeth and they are far sharper. Upload spyware or exploits, lose your job.
The Elixir Markdown implementation doesn't even have an option to turn it off :/
Personally I really dislike Markdown, and this project does what I thought was impossible: it not only removes any & all advantages Markdown has over markup (brevity, human-readability), but it also somehow manages to make the bad things about Markdown (complex parsing, bad spec.) even worse again. Which is a truly impressive feat tbh.
Full marks for ingenuity.
People were writing valid Markdown before it was invented. It doesn't easier than that.
No one ever has intuitively written Dumbdown.
In a word, no. Esoteric seems a stretch as a characterization of Markdown.
While I like the abstraction of using English when programming I would like to keep it out of my text.
Yes. You could translate. But...
If memory serves, early 90's era document editors might not have used them in their file formats, but did have a display mode that used them (so you could figure out why that word keeps being bold after you've told it five times to cut it out)