# `@rjk`'s thoughts on Markdown in kind 1

Admittedly, I'm not the greatest test case, as I live in a world where I see a lot of raw Markdown in plain text files and am quite accustomed to it. IMHO, "worse" is still a *graceful degradation*, with clients that supporting it providing a *progressive enhancement*. I'll point out Gruber's original intent, although perhaps we've collectively moved on:

> The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.