Re:ReStructuredText vs. Markdown for technical documentation
by chipotle_coyote on Friday February 24, 2017 @05:42PM
(#13728622)
While it's technically correct that Markdown has a mishmash of implementations (and technically correct is the best kind of correct, after all), it's worth pointing out that MultiMarkdown has both a well-defined feature set that includes things like tables, footnotes, and citations, a standard way to express metadata, and has a reference implementation in C.
And, you might say, "But I've never heard of MultiMarkdown," but the reality is that if you've used Markdown for creating, well, tables, footnotes or citations, or used a YAML metadata block for a Jekyll blog, or any number of things that weren't in the original Markdown spec but that people in practice do all the time, then you've used something that was either influenced by MultiMarkdown or something that MultiMarkdown adapted.
And that last point is larger than MultiMarkdown, specifically. I'd argue that Markdown as commonly implemented and used can do an awful lot of things that are necessary for technical documentation work. This isn't to say that ReST or AsciiDoc aren't more powerful, but in practice, there's very little I've had to write that can't be written in (Multi)Markdown.
http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/
And, you might say, "But I've never heard of MultiMarkdown," but the reality is that if you've used Markdown for creating, well, tables, footnotes or citations, or used a YAML metadata block for a Jekyll blog, or any number of things that weren't in the original Markdown spec but that people in practice do all the time, then you've used something that was either influenced by MultiMarkdown or something that MultiMarkdown adapted.
And that last point is larger than MultiMarkdown, specifically. I'd argue that Markdown as commonly implemented and used can do an awful lot of things that are necessary for technical documentation work. This isn't to say that ReST or AsciiDoc aren't more powerful, but in practice, there's very little I've had to write that can't be written in (Multi)Markdown.