I agree with both these points. Inter-document references are bad in markdown and wiki style formats. Wikipedia is replete with overlapping and contradictory information that should be pulled from a single source.
Do you have any ideas re link-rot, or underlying assets changing and semantic links becoming invalid? How do you reference a code asset whose name could change, what will not only replace all references in the code but also in the documentation?
Re:Thoughts on Markdown
by wakeupcall on Monday February 21, 2022 @07:27AM
(#30415100)
Cross-reference checking is a huge problem on it's own, almost unrelated to the formatting being used. Some language tooling do provide cross-ref checking, generally as an extra step part of the documentation generation process. I don't have anything to add to the table compared to what we do already...
It's being used a lot for code documentation, but MD is bad fit for documentation. Good documentation requires a lot more formatting and cross-referencing than you'd think. Every language I'm using that has been using MD (for embedded and online docs) added extensions, resulting in more fragmentation.
So in general I switch between 3-4 differently-flavoured markdowns constantly. The extended syntax used by various projects sucks. Where did the simplicity of MD go? It reads poorly when unformatted, which is how I read it 99.9% of the time.
I gravitate more towards RST as it's a bit more widely used, but also agree about AsciiDoc.