In MarsEdit, “HTML Text” is a synonym for “unadulterated markup.” It’s called HTML Text because that’s what the majority of users understand it to be useful for. Any Markdown content will be wrapped up in pure HTML tags, which prevents the Markdown from being rendered either by MarsEdit’s preview window or on your blog. There is no room within “pure HTML” for Markdown to exist. MarsEdit supports two modes of editing: “HTML Text” and “Rich Text.” It’s important to appreciate that in Rich Text mode, everything is converted to pure HTML before publishing to your blog. Note that if you happen to want to use another markup script such as Textile or MultiMarkdown, these guidelines also apply. To assist customers who wish to write in Markdown when publishing to their blogs, I present these guidelines for making the most of MarsEdit. I agree that Markdown should be more explicitly supported, but the extent of Markdown support in MarsEdit may surprise you. Because there is no explicit “Markdown mode,” many people assume there is no support for Markdown. However, for years it has also been confusing how exactly one goes about using Markdown with MarsEdit. For years, MarsEdit has supported Markdown in a manner that makes it easy to write, preview, and publish to a blog without ever dealing in HTML or Rich Text.