Pintrest is the worst website ever built and has caused immense damage to the free sharing of information.

Markdown and HTML are indeed both markup languages, markdown is one that was designed to align with a lot of internet text habits that emerged organically like using *s to create lists and ascii tables.

A reference is available here https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax.text

It is eventually encoded into the DOM possibly via HTML or possibly through direct node creation but it’s more accurate to say it’s markdown.

It does unless you proceed it with a backslash like \*

I grew up with emoticons and find the colorful nature of them quite disruptive… but that might just be me *shrug*