That is a myth. Markdown was not used in plain text messages previous to its creation in 2004. There is no way anyone would write [bla](https://bla.com/) or [![alt text](https://img.com/image.jpg)](https://link.com) in a plain text document.

Also the language is completely unspecified and ultimately unparseable, such that every parser is different and adds a new thing to it, thus making everything incompatible with everything else and incentivizing everybody to support all features that any random person comes up with, which just increases the work for everybody and bloats software everywhere.

To be fair, the initial Markdown version example, https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/index.text, was very readable as plain text specifically because it did NOT use the horrible link formats anywhere. If those were added later by rogue implementations that's another example of the bloat that the Markdown brand has accumulated over the years.

Asciidoc is a much better language, but I also don't think we should use it for the same bloat reasons. We want clients to be simple to implement and kind:1 is already too hard to deal with without all these things.

Bluesky's text formatting is actually the best way to handle this problem I've seen: https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/post-richtext and nostr:npub1l3cgtsurhfchg4cyhhqudm70074sr96srhje330xc5m6czej5n9s9q6vs2 has a NIP proposal that is very similar to that -- but again I don't think we should do any of that at all.