Mind explaining why? I like Markdown but would like to know what ReST does better.

ReST can be better extended without creating a variant of the markup language [1]. Extension support is first class [2], and it is by that means that a good number of the core features are implemented.

[1] For example, github flavour, stackoverflow flavour, reddit flavour, ...

[2] Roles and directives.

One large difference is that Markdown exclusively targets HTML as an output format where ReST tries to be format agnostic. If you only ever target HTML this might ease some things but not if you want html, man pages, pdfs, plain text, …

ReST is a whole multi-document system, as opposed to MD which is just the formatting (at least before you mix in the dozens of mutually incompatible extensions). ReST is a superset.

Depends. We use Markdown pretty extensively and the drawbacks listed on the site don't really apply - you can always either:

1. Embed HTML (more or less preferred, depending on your situation). 2. Create an extension.

>Embed HTML (more or less preferred, depending on your situation)

But then you can't embed markdown inside the HTML, like code blocks inside a table. Sure you can use <pre><code> tags, but then you lose syntax highlighting.

Actually I've always wondered why no MD renderer supports something like

    <code data-lang="js">

which it then treats the same as a

    ```js

code block. Or a pseudo <x-markdown> element...

Kramdown supports this with markdown="1" as an attribute on html tags: http://kramdown.gettalong.org/syntax.html#html-blocks

Not only are you correct, you allowed me to find an equivalent feature in CommonMark! If there is an empty line between some content and its wrapping HTML tags then that content will be interpreted as markdown. So

    <td>
    
    ```js
    console.log("Hello, world!");
    ```
    
    </td>

will work as expected. http://spec.commonmark.org/0.26/#example-118 and further discussion at http://spec.commonmark.org/0.26/#example-153

VSCode's markdown preview renderer ( https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it ) implements CommonMark, so I'm very happy right now :)

> But then you can't embed markdown inside the HTML, like code blocks inside a table. Sure you can use <pre><code> tags, but then you lose syntax highlighting.

Pandoc supports this with the `markdown_in_html_blocks` option.

3. Pick a language that already supports it and is stable, standardized, without having to whip out some specialized version just for your codebase.

Not like you have to do anything to get it to work OOB, but your mileage may vary. One of the benefits of Markdown is that it's easily understood by people new to the doc space. RST is slightly more complex and has more rules added in.