Lambda the Ultimate

Currently LtU offers the input options "Plain Text + HTML" and "HTML". I have grown to find them rather irritating for several reasons:

- having to manually use HTML escape codes for < and > makes some things almost unusable for me (this comes a lot in the current Frank discussion). It is painful to write, and painful to read back when editing a post.
- the syntax for inline code, namely <code>..&lt/code> is goofy and impractical in practice, compared to `...` in Markdown.
- other parts of the HTML syntax have less overhead, but still prevent me from using them more often: links and lists come to mind. (As I'm writing this, I realize that I am writing a textual list. I'll leave it as is for the example, although I would usually rewrite my posts in full <ul><li>...</li><li>...</li><ul> clad.)

(some form of) Markdown has gathered consensus among websites that expect user comments, for example Github and Reddit. I would be very happy if we could have a Markdown input option in LtU. Because it does "the right thing" with text by default, and also supports raw HTML fragments, I think this option should be the default.

P.S.: Ehud, in 2010 you were of the opinion that technical information on the website platform are off-topic, even in the "Site operations discussions" forum. Is it still the case? I started by looking for technical information on where the site's source could be found, to see if I could consider contributing Markdown support myself (or at least evaluate the effort that would be involved), but was unable to find any information. Would you consider sharing a bit of information on the site's internals to encourage people to lend a hand from times to times?