The Cunctator wrote:
The reason is that wiki markup is designed to be more comfortably human-readable than is HTML markup.
== Big heading == [[Link]] has ''many'' ways of going: # One, # Two, # Three.
How about that!
is much terser and easier to parse than
<h2>Big heading</h2> <a href="?Link">Link</a> has <i>many</i> ways of going: <ol> <li>One, <li>Two, <li>Three. </ol> <p> How about that! </p>
And we operate on the general assumption that the majority of people are familiar with neither.
Also, our own wiki markup gives us a better chance of producing the /correct/ HTML -- which in this case is <em>, not <i> at all. ^_^
-- Toby