The fatal flaw of HTML (and XML for that matter) is that the tags have the same visual weight as the text they're delimiting, which makes for a sense of clutter even in your minimal example.
Markdown really scores here, by having a pleasing plain text representation as a goal from the outset, and I've love to see it used more widely for web pages.
I'd also love to see it more widely used for offline reading, too - the help files in an application really shouldn't need to invoke a web browser to view them when a lightweight markdown viewer would do the job. Not that there is a lightweight markdown viewer, mind you!
Markdown really scores here, by having a pleasing plain text representation as a goal from the outset, and I've love to see it used more widely for web pages.
I'd also love to see it more widely used for offline reading, too - the help files in an application really shouldn't need to invoke a web browser to view them when a lightweight markdown viewer would do the job. Not that there is a lightweight markdown viewer, mind you!