Re:Dumbdown – A Tree Language that compiles to HTML
by kerkeslager on Monday September 02, 2019 @01:40PM
(#20860650)
It's better because it's specified.
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.
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.