Markdown vs HyperText Markup Language (HTML)

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.

Styling through CSS is declarative and powerful, but somewhat inadequate for print without expensive tools like Prince.

Natively understood by browsers, you can author and view HTML on virtually every computer without any additional software.

HTML is fairly simple for both humans and machines. It can be repetitive and burdensome to type, but less so than most other XML or SGML-derived formats.

JavaScript code can be embedded directly into a HTML document.