[bobbylarrybobby]

Asciidoctor has a spec, reads pretty similarly to markdown, and is infinitely better IMO. And it (well, AsciiDoc) predated markdown!

I think markdown won because it was specifically made with HTML output in mind, instead of arbitrary output (docbook, in the case of AsciiDoc, which is pretty much infinitely malleable).

[premysl]

The Asciidoctor flavour of AsciiDoc doesn't have a specification. There is only a working group. The parsers are a mess composed of regular expressions.

There are in effect two different versions of AsciiDoc, because Asciidoctor people have appropriated the name while making their own changes to it and marking what they dislike as deprecated.

AsciiDoc cannot express all of DocBook, for example figures with multiple images.

While I despise Markdown, there isn't all that much to be a fanboy of. Just the syntax is overall saner.

[MilStdJunkie]

Ah, DocBook //imageobjectco with something like calspair as well. I've been wanting it badly, but there's zero movement in the Asciidoctor group to try and tackle that beast.

With all due respect, and speaking as an amateur programmer, when it comes to lightweight markup, is there a better way to write a parser besides regular expressions? I suppose it's how the semantics are abstracted.

Asciidoc does get you conditionals and transclusion in the core spec, without needing to resort to extensions. This is what brought me over. That and the XML interoperability.

The Eclipse WG isn't published yet, but, in my opinion, it's a more stable surface to build on than the "many worlds" of Markdown.

Every time someone shows me a cool markdown trick, it requires me to pull something down from github and `npm-install` (or equivalent). But, well, that's kind of the point, isn't it? Markdown's ease of implementation allows a degree of glorious hackery that's just not possible otherwise. While Asciidoctor's great albatross - and its great asset - is Ruby . . which inevitably involves Opal at some point.