[bccdee]

> I read portable as meaning the format’s semantics are consistent across platforms.

By that definition, a format which is only implemented on one platform is 100% consistent. I agree Markdown is uniquely fragmented, but it's also uniquely widespread.

Markdown is an extensible core for writing platform-specific languages. I think comparing markdown in general to something like DocBook is comparing apples to oranges. Instead compare (e.g.) Pandoc's specific markdown variant to DocBook.

[hysan]

> I think comparing markdown in general to something like DocBook is comparing apples to oranges.

Hmm let me rephrase the issue I have with the comments in this thread. If your position is that markdown doesn’t belong in the same category as the others, then yeah, I agree. But I also think that’s basically rejecting the premise of the article and there isn’t a discussion to be had. If you disagree with the core premise, then it doesn’t matter what is said, there’s no discussion to be had.

However, the original parent comment is stating that the author’s assertion is false because you can extend markdown. I don’t see how that logic doesn’t run into the semantics and “portability” problems that the author is writing about.

[bccdee]

I think you can have the discussion, but you also have to be careful about how you have it. Markdown is a family of languages; if you want to evaluate markdown against something like asciidoc for a particular use case, you have to pick the members of the markdown family which are best-suited for that use case and evaluate those flavours individually.

Take the comparison between markdown and asciidoc. You can't say, "asciidoc has semantic structure and markdown doesn't," because pandoc markdown does have semantic structure. If you need semantics, you can use pandoc markdown, which is a very fully-featured language that suffers from none of the issues the author points out. Yes, other flavours of markdown exist too, but so what? This one has great tooling and suits your needs.

Of course, you can't use pandoc in (e.g.) Reddit comments. But you also don't really need semantic markup in Reddit comments. It's a different flavour of markdown in a different application that is solving a different problem. Or consider MDX: Yes, `Command` is a react component, but maybe it needs to be a react component. Maybe it has a "run this command" button, or it generates an interactive graph of some sort. If you mark that up in asciidoc, you need a whole separate system to attach your components to your markup. That's just using the wrong tool for the job.