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A Markdown editor? Is that a plain text editor with buttons to trigger the Markdown syntax for the current selection? I too don't get the Markdown hype, but maybe that's just because I'm in favor of XML because of its rich tooling ;-) As you said, people will use what's easy, so I did OpenOffice/LibreOffice first, while its usability concept is ill-suited for writing long texts in my opinion, especially it's too easy to produce a badly formatted document.
Regarding Markdown flavors, one would go after the one that aims for standardization while retaining compatibility to as much other flavors as possible, or, if such thing doesn't exist, the most widely used one. If RobertDDL is interested, he could write converters from the other flavors to the standard flavor. Anyway, I only brought Markdown up because I think using Markdown as input for conversion would be way better to define yet another new plain text markup format, which naturally will look pretty much just like Markdown.
Using Markdown would be more future-proof because documentation will be around for some time (unfortunately, it's not self-expressive) and hopefully somebody will write a converter to convert Markdown texts to whatever format comes along in the future or to a bunch of formats, of which some probably will survive longer. I mean, plain text is plain text, ASCII or UTF-8, and as long as there are universal computers around, one will be able to extract at least the plain text and just have to replace the formatting instructions. Pandoc would already consume such files as input, and if more flexibility is needed, I could integrate such a converter even in my toolchain, if freely licensed and based upon free/open technologies.
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