[lelanthran]

> org-mode is just much more complicated to implement though and just contains so much.

So just implement the features it has in common with Markdown and add the rest as and when people ask for them.

For me, org-mode syntax is just that much more intuitive than Markdown. I sometimes feel that when devs invent something (Markdown, YAML, etc), they really should do 5 minutes of research before inventing their thing.

Markdown should have used all the org-mode syntax for the the features they wanted.

[setopt]

Markdown was based on the "syntax" already being used informally in emails and on IRC. So the author did do some searching to define the syntax.

I don’t like many parts of markdown either (like the syntax for bold), but those were also IIRC already being parsed by some IRC clients before Markdown was specified.

[lelanthran]

> Markdown was based on the "syntax" already being used informally in emails and on IRC.

News to me :-/

> So the author did do some searching to define the syntax.

I recall using tin/rtin in 1995, and people used the org mode syntax for italics, underline and bold (not that it made any difference). Same with plain-text email (I used elm, then pine, then mutt). Same with IRC clients - convention was the org mode syntax, not the markdown we have today.

The very first time I saw '**' for bold was in setext, circa 2004. People weren't actually using setext though; they were using *some text*, _some text_ and /some text/.

Here is a post from January 2001 documenting what the existing conventions were: https://everything2.com/title/conventions+for+plain+text

Here is the jargon file (maintained in the 90s by Guy Steele and ESR) that documented the the markup/typography conventions of the time: https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.html

In short, no, I don't believe that the authors did any research. I think what happened is that they saw something like setext, though "great idea, lets run with that!", and did so.