While I understand where Rachel is coming from, (I have spend many an hour wrestling with the vagaries of TCPDF to appease my client), I also see the point of view of the client.
On a website that is structured to accommodate simple text and image input, such as a blog, newsletter or product info then yes Textile & Markdown is perfectly usable, although why we can’t have simple icon selection for the various attributes ( *, **, ****, etc ) I don’t know.
But, for sites that are required by such business as the Legal Profession, Town Planning, Architectural and other professionals it is by no means straight forward.
They are required to place on-line some fairly complex documents, with – wait for it – Tables, these can be vary from document to document in the number of column, size etc. so you can’t just create a template.
They have big secretarial pools who input all this data, and they like Word
So what are we to do, and don’t say link to PDF’s I want the sites to be responsive and not crash.
It’s a problem that is not going away, and the web industry needs to find a solution.