Some journals will publish a separate file in XML, specially if they are open access. As for why PDFs, I think the answers are:
1. P (portable): you can access it offline, store it locally and annotate (something that researchers do extensively for key articles)
2. design: despite all possibilities with html, including html5, flex, interactive graphics and apps, pdf still allows you to have a much more granular control over design, and looks matter
3. tradition - old habits die hard
Specifically in relation to markdown, although some of its flavors are semantic, and that it also allows for absolutely awesome things such as R markdown (Rmd), tagging specific article sections is still complicated and cumbersome. Including div tags inside markdown has a number of issues. This is all to say that although there is a lot of people writing articles in Rmd, it is not an ideal solution.
Sublime for most things, but Atom does have a few nice features: better markdown preview, drop down menu for things like autocompletion and snippets, nicer color syntax overall (same theme looks better on Atom, I think), a single file for all snippets (I personally think it makes it easier to manage). Main problem with Atom is speed, but there were also a few poor choices such as the package installation interface.
Actually, I gave up trying to find the perfect editor a long time ago, and now just use different ones for whatever they might do better: emacs for org-mode and ESS, vim for editing on servers, sublime 2 for a few plugins that won't work on 3, but sublime 3 is my home base. That being said, sublime looks like a ghost project, hone update/year is just not enough.
We could do so much more research for all diseases. Personally, in 1985, I would have expected cancer, AIDS, and many other major disease to all be cured by now. It's actually depressing how much work remains.
If their original prices were 20% higher, I don't think you'd be saying Digital Ocean pricing is nuts. Backups are just an easy way to get people who don't mind spending money to spend money. Everyone else can do their own backups or take free snapshots (which has an API as well).
I don't have an iphone and so can't install it, but here is a question: if it's anonymous posting and in a social network, maybe there is a lack of incentive since I don't know who will be following me and I can't be identified. but this is just a guess. what is the closest anonymous social network you're trying to emulate?
btw, when you had your initial idea did you run it by people who resembled your target audience or did you go straight into production mode?
btw, you now have comment that says "never ran just crashed. deleting"
1. P (portable): you can access it offline, store it locally and annotate (something that researchers do extensively for key articles) 2. design: despite all possibilities with html, including html5, flex, interactive graphics and apps, pdf still allows you to have a much more granular control over design, and looks matter 3. tradition - old habits die hard
Specifically in relation to markdown, although some of its flavors are semantic, and that it also allows for absolutely awesome things such as R markdown (Rmd), tagging specific article sections is still complicated and cumbersome. Including div tags inside markdown has a number of issues. This is all to say that although there is a lot of people writing articles in Rmd, it is not an ideal solution.