It's mind-blowing that not a single flavor of markdown tried to address the localization issue. RTL (right-to-left) languages should be represented correctly in the rendered document (HTML or not). There's been fragmented discussions on how to best work that in, some suggested using some right-pointing brackets '>' before any RTL text and others chimed in variations of that.

I believe text in RTL languages should be treated just like any other text, except when rendered, where the parser should hopefully have a mechanism to detect RTL text blocks and adding the necessary 'dir="rtl"' paragraphs.

Twitter has a js library that detects if the text being entered in from an RTL language and adjusts the direction directly. https://github.com/twitter/RTLtextarea Something like that should be worked into the parser itself.