I like this more than you’d think; my whole website is an extended exercise of Doing Cool Stuff with CSS and HTML generated from Markdown, but I always feel a little uncomfortable doing anything too fun when userstyles are not common practice. I could totally create a style switcher with Javascript, but… wouldn’t it be better if that were built into the client?
Reader mode in Firefox is what I’d like to fall back to, but it doesn’t handle my footnotes right now. :(
I mean, I’m not just playing devil’s advocate here–your personal-experience-driven sense of what’s crucial and what’s peripheral in terms of “good enough” is valid for you, but other people clearly think differently or they wouldn’t be making a direct asciidoc v. markdown comparison in the markdown spec intro.
Anything short of LaTeX makes trade-offs to increase readability at the expense of other stuff. Extensive familiarity with a markup language decreases our ability to perceive whether it’s approachable enough for new non-technical folks. Because of that, and because of the relative greater important of their experience (I who Care about these things and am decent with installs have a million options available to me, but does my manager’s manager’s manager? Does my aunt?) I kinda have to look at the flaws (significant trailing whitespace is an abomination, you are correct) like… “well, obviously this doesn’t matter as much as my instincts would suggest.”
Footnotes are IMO a great example of something that should only be supported via plugin because boy do people have different ideas about how they should work (cf. LaTeX’s options)