Clean slate design. I think pandoc markdown is a superset of markdown, which must parse the ambiguous parts of the spec. Djot has a goal to eliminate the corner cases and be able to represent all things without requiring the html escape hatch (eg bold text within a word).

The rationale page can do a better job than myself. https://github.com/jgm/djot#rationale

Thanks, that makes sense. Although I’d like to point out that one of the listed problems with commonmark, and the problem you mention, are not problems with Pandoc markdown:

    : echo "word**withboldtext**inside" | pandoc
    <p>word<strong>withboldtext</strong>inside</p>

    : echo "a*?*b" | pandoc
    <p>a<em>?</em>b</p>