Markdown vs reStructuredText

Designed to be easy for a human to enter with a simple text editor, and easy to read in its raw form.

Markdown is quickly becoming the writing standard for academics, scientists, writers, and many more. Websites like GitHub and reddit use Markdown to style their comments.

Markdown is ubiquitous. It's supported by nearly everything. The markup available in the common subset of all the many dialects isn't that rich, but it's usually enough to get the job done.

You can convert HTML to Markdown or Markdown to HTML. You can use tools like pandoc to convert to other formats as well.

It is easy to track changes for markdown documents as compared to other formats like doc, html, etc. You only need to place your markdown documents under some version control system.

reStructuredText is an easy-to-read, what-you-see-is-what-you-get plaintext markup syntax and parser system.

Without any adjustments RST has many facilities for writing technical documentation (API docs, syntax highlighting code, embed code from source files).

Python's docutils include a parser for RestructuredText.

Generators such as Sphinx allow you to define your own custom roles, directives and output generators.

There's only one standard to adhere to - no "flavors".