.Ordered

. number

. number

  .. letter

  .. letter

1. number

2. number

   a. letter

   b. letter

Level 3 Heading

^^^^^^^

Level 4 Heading

+++++++++++++++

Why? ^^ or ++ is this in any way intuitive or an established convention that is so much better?

PS: See Text with Instructions (.texti) for a (better) Markdown evolved variant / flavor :-) - https://texti.github.io

> PS: See Text with Instructions (.texti) for a (better) Markdown evolved variant / flavor

You have answered yourself: markdown is not a language that can be improved, it's a mashup of several different slightly incompatible implementations, much like HTML in the early web during browser wars.

You could try to create a standard body that defined a homogeneous definition that everybody adheres to and which could be extended with new features.

But by that time you'd be better served off by using asciidoc, which already did that job and which is actually based on Docbook, supporting all the features of that complete standard for book publishing.

It isn't - the point is that asciidoc has a 'spec' whereas markdown has dialects because it's not rigourously specified (core or extensions). Which one you might run into is the luck of the draw.

Should you try to improve markdown (and lots of people have), you end up with the N+1 standards problem (famous xkcd cartoon) and further fragmenting the implementation if at all it takes off.

Getting one 'Markdown' that has features (and extensions) that work properly wherever you go isn't a technical problem . It's a problem created by the lack of a spec in the first place and IMO pretty much unsolvable now.

Ordered lists do not need ".Ordered" to begin (https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-syntax-quick-reference... scroll down a little). You don't need the leading spaces for sublists either.

I'll grant you that the period is a little more annoying than the numbers, but it's honestly not a big deal, and also means that long lists (longer than 10 elements) have consistent spacing.

For headers, you don't need those different formats (https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-syntax-quick-reference...). It's just equal signs the whole way.

This is a case of, "It doesn't matter what side of the road you drive on, as long as everyone drives on the same side."

Your link asks repeatedly whether we've learned anything over the last 10+ years. One thing we've learned over the last 10+ years is that underspecified organically emergent "standards" result in a bunch of inconsistent behavior that confuses users.

I won't claim that AsciiDoc fixes the problem--it would need to be adopted more widely and it's not really trying to do the same thing as Markdown--it's not trying to make something that's both readable as plain text and generatable into rich text. But simply focusing on some aesthetic qualities of the markup shows you aren't really understanding the problem with Markdown.

Asciidoc definitely seemed like the best option. The biggest thing for me was the ability to do complex numbered headers.

Unfortunately the tooling wasn’t really good enough for my use case. I needed a clean way to move between Asciidoc and Word, and it wasn’t really possible. Pandoc claimed support for both Asciidoc and word, but it was only partial and couldn’t round-Trip the document. I considered developing & contributing the functionality, but I didn’t know the language the tool was written in and couldn’t justify investing more time in the experiment.

Maybe it’s time to review the tooling situation and take another crack at it...

It won't roundtrip (and I doubt anything will ever) but I usually go only one way - converting to docx in the last stage.

[1] for example, this: https://a-nikolaev.github.io/fp/lec/2/

    link http://asciidoc.org/ AsciiDoc