The repo owner, John McFarlane, is the primary developer for PanDoc. Having to wrestle with Markdown (and multiple flavors no less) led to him developing CommonMark (which is some small tweaks from Markdown but with a spec!).
Which is all to say this is probably pretty well thought out, but take a look.
Neat. Anything looking to challenge the limitations and ergonomics of Markdown is worth a look (I’m looking at those users abusing and overloading > / <blockquote> for unsemantic ‘admonition’, but this is just one of the isuses).
I’m usually a fan of AsciiDoc for its feature richness and syntax, but the tooling can be slow and heavy (Ruby or Python). I do prefer the AsciiDoc link syntax now though as it better matches the HTML where <a href="http://f">link</a> is http://f[link] which makes it easier to convert between the two when needed. It seems both djot and AsciiDoc though don’t allow multiple <dd> elements inside a definition list which is a shame as the HTML spec allows it–and they both insert a <p> inside the <dd> too which isn’t always necessary/desired. djot has blockquotes but I wish like AsciiDoc it had citing as something standardized because mentioning who said the quote and where is common. Similar can be said about wanting a <figcaption> for images which is very common in book context which a project goal is being output format agnostic (not just HTML). Having <del> is something that wildly Asciidoc doesn’t support. And you gotta love seeing smart quotes built-in as most of use Anglophones learned to write them curly in school, but stopped caring about the typography when we came to machines–similar goes for dashes and ellipses (and I love that Lobsters does this conversion too).
This looks pretty nice. Very similar to Markdown, but much more powerful and also easier to parse, with a cleaner and more composable syntax. It seems well designed.
I really want to like this—it’s a lot better designed than Markdown—but nested sublists without blank lines between them are non-negotiable for me. That’s how I write all of my notes, in text files that are kinda-sorta-Markdown but never parsed. I get how the newline removes ambiguity, but it will constantly trip me up. Nested bulleted lists are my spacebar heating, I guess.
That decision really messed up some of the syntax, mandating blank lines in places they shouldn’t IMHO be needed.
I anticipate that many will ask, why hard-wrap at all? Answer: so that your document is readable just as it is, without conversion to HTML and without special editor modes that soft-wrap long lines.
Dude, it’s 2022. We may not have flying cars or a Mars base, but I think soft-wrapping text is a solved problem by now, and universally available. Let’s stop pandering to neckbeards who insist everything we write should fit on punch cards. (They probably write in troff syntax not Markdown anyway.)
It sounds to me that you’ve never considered using semantic line breaks while writing prose in markdown-like markup languages. In my experience, breaking lines after a sentence or independent clause makes it easier to read and edit during the writing process than either soft-wrapped text or text hard-wrapped at a fixed column count.
Let’s stop pandering to neckbeards who insist everything we write should fit on punch cards.
Could we please not attack people? It’s much more interesting to attack ideas.
It is also much fuller-featured than commonmark, with support for definition lists, footnotes, tables, several new kinds of inline formatting (insert, delete, highlight, superscript, subscript), math, smart punctuation, attributes that can be applied to any element, and generic containers for block-level, inline-level, and raw content.
well, in the web context, “Links should look like links, and nothing else should”, and more often than not links are underlined. And apart from that, using underlines for emphasis or other typographical purposes is discouraged by most authorities. Using up an ascii punctuation character for underlining would be a mistake imo.
The repo owner, John McFarlane, is the primary developer for PanDoc. Having to wrestle with Markdown (and multiple flavors no less) led to him developing CommonMark (which is some small tweaks from Markdown but with a spec!).
Which is all to say this is probably pretty well thought out, but take a look.
Neat. Anything looking to challenge the limitations and ergonomics of Markdown is worth a look (I’m looking at those users abusing and overloading
>/<blockquote>for unsemantic ‘admonition’, but this is just one of the isuses).I’m usually a fan of AsciiDoc for its feature richness and syntax, but the tooling can be slow and heavy (Ruby or Python). I do prefer the AsciiDoc link syntax now though as it better matches the HTML where
<a href="http://f">link</a>ishttp://f[link]which makes it easier to convert between the two when needed. It seems both djot and AsciiDoc though don’t allow multiple<dd>elements inside a definition list which is a shame as the HTML spec allows it–and they both insert a<p>inside the<dd>too which isn’t always necessary/desired. djot has blockquotes but I wish like AsciiDoc it had citing as something standardized because mentioning who said the quote and where is common. Similar can be said about wanting a<figcaption>for images which is very common in book context which a project goal is being output format agnostic (not just HTML). Having<del>is something that wildly Asciidoc doesn’t support. And you gotta love seeing smart quotes built-in as most of use Anglophones learned to write them curly in school, but stopped caring about the typography when we came to machines–similar goes for dashes and ellipses (and I love that Lobsters does this conversion too).This looks pretty nice. Very similar to Markdown, but much more powerful and also easier to parse, with a cleaner and more composable syntax. It seems well designed.
I really want to like this—it’s a lot better designed than Markdown—but nested sublists without blank lines between them are non-negotiable for me. That’s how I write all of my notes, in text files that are kinda-sorta-Markdown but never parsed. I get how the newline removes ambiguity, but it will constantly trip me up. Nested bulleted lists are my spacebar heating, I guess.
That decision really messed up some of the syntax, mandating blank lines in places they shouldn’t IMHO be needed.
Dude, it’s 2022. We may not have flying cars or a Mars base, but I think soft-wrapping text is a solved problem by now, and universally available. Let’s stop pandering to neckbeards who insist everything we write should fit on punch cards. (They probably write in troff syntax not Markdown anyway.)
It sounds to me that you’ve never considered using semantic line breaks while writing prose in markdown-like markup languages. In my experience, breaking lines after a sentence or independent clause makes it easier to read and edit during the writing process than either soft-wrapped text or text hard-wrapped at a fixed column count.
Could we please not attack people? It’s much more interesting to attack ideas.
Why does everyone hate underlines?
well, in the web context, “Links should look like links, and nothing else should”, and more often than not links are underlined. And apart from that, using underlines for emphasis or other typographical purposes is discouraged by most authorities. Using up an ascii punctuation character for underlining would be a mistake imo.