Annotations and Markdown

One of the biggest benefits and problems with Markdown is everything is visible. All the markup is visible, all of the time. Sometimes this isn't a problem, and the advantage is that it's human-readable. But some markup it would be nice to hide or elide in certain circumstances.

The main one I'm thinking of is inline commenting. I like to copy-edit as I write - introduce comments and highlights. Think Google Docs. This simply isn't possible in Markdown without some real awkwardness.

See Critic Markup for an example of how bad it can be. Extending Markdown to support this leads to madness.

Markdown should be an output of an intermediate format. Provide credible exit without requiring markdown be the core format.

Related: Markdown Lake.