No, but you can copy as HTML code, which is valid Markdown, using Quick Copy. (Or you can save as HTML using "Create Bibliography from Items" and copy the HTML from the file, but that's more work.)

Markdown itself can't properly represent all the formatting that citation styles require, so this wouldn't make sense. But you can always paste HTML into a Markdown document.

Markdown users may also be interested in this add-on: https://github.com/argenos/zotero-mdnotes

@t0dd: I mean, those aren't comparable — you're including document, head, and body tags in one and not the other, and you're removing the COinS span that lets the data be saved back to Zotero. When you save a file via Create Bibliography from Items, it creates a full HTML file, but for just dropping in a Markdown document you would copy HTML via Quick Copy, where you get just the csl-bib-body div.

So the only actual differences are the italics and the link, which are pretty minimal, and if the whole thing has to be wrapped in HTML tags for styling anyway, who cares? You just ignore that block. This isn't body text that's meant to be human readable or writable.

the differences are the italics, the link, *and* all that headers cruft which is unneccessary in a markdown file, whether a full file or a snippet

No, you're still misunderstanding this. Again, nothing outside of the csl-bib-body div appears if you use Quick Copy, which is what you would be doing if copying into a Markdown file. So the only relevant comparison here is the two csl-bib-body divs. And the COinS span serves a functional purpose, so you can't just arbitrarily remove that in one if comparing the two. So, again, the only differences are the italics and the link.

If you need HTML divs, inline CSS, and COinS spans in both, then it just makes no sense to worry about the italics and link, which are barely noticeable in the context of the rest. It's just a chunk of HTML that you paste in to get a bibliography, the same as any other special-purpose block of HTML you might paste into a Markdown file. Just ignore it.

My hand created stuff looks even more stripped down (and I move the CSS to a stylesheet), but that is beyond the discussion

The inner divs aren't optional for many citation styles, so this isn't a relevant example.

The span. I had no idea why it was there. So I suppose that remains. How does that work with an RTF document?

The COinS lets Zotero save data from webpages. (The 'S' in COinS stands for 'spans'.) It's not relevant for RTF.

I guess I am not understanding the purpose of having the option of downloading an HTML or RTF file if everyone is only supposed to use Quick Copy.

It's not that you're only supposed to use Quick Copy. But if you're trying to add something to a Markdown document, the whole point of which is to be human-readable, presumably there's already other human-readable content in the document, so pasting something in via Quick Copy makes sense. With HTML output in Create Bibliography, you can use the output file as is if you really want to. But there'd be no reason to output to Markdown if you were just using the output as is.

The main other benefit to Create Bibliography is that you can configure the style settings on the fly, and if you want that for your Markdown document, you can take the extra two seconds to strip the headers. But the csl-bib-body, for the reasons I've explained, would be almost entirely the same even in a Markdown version, so it wouldn't make sense to create an option called "Markdown" for Create Bibliography whose main difference was not including the HTML header. This use case would be better addressed just by providing an option in the dialog to copy to the clipboard as an HTML snippet instead of formatted text, as is an option with Quick Copy.

(RTF isn't really relevant here. That needs to be a file to be openable in word processors.)

As for the spans, I don't see it as being relevant to markdown either, but I may be wrong.

The standard output of Markdown is HTML, so if you want Zotero to be able to import data back from the webpage, you would want to keep the span.

nah, this is were discussion happens. Zotero uses github tickets to track things devs are planning to implement, so if you open one for md it'd just get closed immediately.

FWIW, I know there are use cases for just copy&paste, but my sense is that most people working/writing in markdown (of which there are many) just create the bibliographies via pandoc/pandoc-citeproc (for which there a number of elegant workflows from Zotero) and the main use case for copy&paste are people using md to build jekyll or hugo websites, for which the html option actually provides a better solution, so yours is a pretty niche request.

Could probably be done by an add-on which might be as simple as re-converting the html output to md automatically.