<p><pre><code> - No changes to protocols. Simply use markdown in the Content-Type.
- No breaking changes. Clients that don't support markdown can display it as plain text.
- Rendering can be performed on the client side. Users can apply their favorite CSS for the reading pane.</code></pre>
While very popular and well-known by the tech community, markdown is very niche and unknown to the general public.<p>Fun fact: markdown's syntax was inspired by plain-text email conventions:<p>> ...the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.<p><a href="https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/" rel="nofollow">https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/</a>