Re:Dumbdown – A Tree Language that compiles to HTML
by geraldbauer on Monday September 02, 2019 @10:23AM
(#20859255)
Sorry you are misreading and misstating what I said - markdown is a language and can of course be improved as many flavors / dialects / extensions and so on proof. Evolution is usually way better in finding conventions than your top-down Docbook in Ascii (Asciidoc) flavor. Again (re)read the post above and tell me how the Asciidoc ordered list using . and .. is more readable or the heading level 3 or 4 using ^^ or ++ and so on.
Re:Dumbdown – A Tree Language that compiles to HTML
by rraghur on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @09:47AM
(#20866398)
> post above and tell me how the Asciidoc ordered list using . and .. is more readable
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.
> 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.