All the benefits OP sees for AsciiDoc are negatives in my book. The primary benefit to Markdown (in my opinion) is that it is always plain human readable text.

All the benefits OP sees for AsciiDoc are negatives in my book. The primary benefit to Markdown (in my opinion) is that it is always plain human readable text. I don't have to worry that there will still be a program in the future that knows what include::source_code.js [] function multiply(num1,num2) { var result = num1 * num2; return result; } means or how to process it. I can read markdown easily without having to run it through a program. Of course it is nice to run it through a program to change bold text to <b>bold text</b>, but that is entirely optional. I keep all my notes and other writings in markdown because I know that even if all markdown parsers ceased to exist and another one was never written, I would still be able to read everything with no trouble.