One of the advantages of Markdown is portability. It’s just text, so pretty much any software can read it.
Pages is a terrible choice for portability. Apple hasn’t published the format, so it can’t be read by anything but Pages.
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I’m not saying Pages is a good choice for portability, quite the opposite. I’m saying that something could work like Pages from a front end point of view, and use extremely portable HTML and CSS as its native format.
I didn’t say that it’s impossible with HTML. I just said that probably not many people write HTML nowadays, so there’s probably not a market for this kind of tools.
Increasingly many people use a web browser for their word processing and want to produce content for the web, so it seems to me that people might write documents in HTML if better applications existed. And some HTML editors capable of semantic WYSIWYG-style editing do exist, but they’re typically aimed at web applications and configured by default to be style soup.
Sure, HTML for word processing wouldn’t give you benefits like device independence that you can get from HTML, but they’d at least give you a compact standardized portable file format that can easily be put online. There’s clearly a demand for that, or Markdown wouldn’t have become so widespread.
Writing in a web-based note taker has nothing to do with the user’s awareness of HTML. I’ll take bets that the vast, vast majority of people who use markdown have no idea that someone named Gruber “invented” it as a way to facilitate HTML creation. Those days are 22 years and decades of invention behind us. Look at the source code for any website – there is no way that vanilla markdown could be used to render that code. But the deal is, no one is going to care to try any more.
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That’s why I’d like better HTML-based editors. The limitations of Markdown are frustrating, but editing HTML is annoying and intrusive.