It’s been a while since I’ve looked, but last I did the popular build systems were not generating javadoc by default. That leaves the vast majority of doc reading through editors or code browsers. I doubt most Java devs even know that Javadoc is HTML.
Moving to Markdown kills two birds with one stone and allows fallback to HTML for the complex cases. I would wager >80% of JavaDocs would instantly look better if they just enabled it by default.
Not sure what you mean by that. You mostly get by with a <p> between paragraphs and the occasional <ul><li> or <pre>. And you’ll have the {@…} tags in any case. IDEs usually highlight HTML tags within javadoc differently, which helps readability.
The one thing that is indeed annoying is the </>/&.
That’s very noisy when the equivalent MD is so lightweight (hyphen for bullet points is as lightweight as it gets).
> And you’ll have the {@…} tags in any case. IDEs usually highlight HTML tags within javadoc differently, which helps readability.
The Java response to anything: Well with an IDE…
About IDEs, yeah, Java is certainly an IDE language, no sensible way around that.
The fact that whitespace isn't significant in standard javadoc is complete insanity - you have to choose between "readable in my text editor" and "readable in the compiled form", and there's no way to have both. Unless you use a 3rd party thing to accept markdown (or other format with significant whitespace).