Design philosophy
“A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.” - from John Gruber’s philosophy for Markdown.
Take a moment to view the simple-example.md file in GitHub for a simple example of Markdown and how it’s rendered.
By design, Markdown syntax elements are comprised of punctuation characters. The characters were carefully chosen to convey meaning. For example:
Asterisks around a word actually look like emphasis
Markdown lists look like lists
Blockquotes look like quoted passages of text
“… assuming you’ve ever used email”
Compare the plaintext (Raw) view to the syntax-highlighted view (Code) to the rendered view (Preview).