I've been using Asciidoc ever since I discovered it and use it a lot to be my defacto README text file. It's readable in text and it can output all kinds of other formats, like man pages, pdf, html, etc.

Lately I've been seeing more and more FLOSS projects using markdown. It's slick as far as I can tell, but it still feels far more limited then Asciidoc. Even github seems to support .md better then asciidoc. Am I missing something? Is there a reason so many people are using .md?

I would think the portability of asciidoc and one text file to bind them all makes it much more powerful.

If anyone has any insights, or can tell my why markdown (MD) is so amazing, I'll buy you a virtual beer.