| > I think it would easier to build a website with a more feature-rich <textarea> alternative, than it would be to push that clunky syntax onto end-users. The <textarea> we always have with us. Anything extensively indentation-based is doomed as a general-purpose web markup language (where you’re typing in that markup language—WYSIWYG/WYSIWYM editors are another matter), because all <textarea> “enhancements” will behave differently and will be at least a little painful. > reStructuredText and AsciiDoc are already straddling the line between Markdown and full-featured markup languages. I think that’s the wrong framing. All three have roughly the same goals, just Markdown is… worse. And yeah, I’m going to stick with that. Markdown is a low-quality hack that unfortunately (in my mind) gained popularity, a textbook case of “worse is better”, because its dodgy HTML foundation and simple processing model made it far easier to adopt (with many painful incompatibilities between implementations) than something like reStructuredText which is actually sound but takes a lot more effort to implement, so that there’s really only one implementation of it. reStructuredText and AsciiDoc are full-featured presentation-agnostic markup languages. Markdown is itself fairly minimally-featured, which works out because it’s tied to HTML, which carries the burden of supporting more extensive functionality (though not very well). LaTeX is a full-featured presentation-locked markup language. It is not at all suitable as an alternative for the likes of reStructuredText, as reStructuredText is much more flexible on presentation options. With something like Sphinx, you can target HTML, LaTeX, Windows’ old-style help, man pages, and more. |