3 ms·
> I had the impression Markdown already is the dumb alternative to AsciiDoc. AsciiDoc wasn't in the running for the same use-cases at the time Markdown was con
by webmaven 6y ago
> I had the impression Markdown already is the dumb alternative to AsciiDoc.
AsciiDoc wasn't in the running for the same use-cases at the time Markdown was conceived. It really wasn't in use except in a few niches like O'Reilly's internal book production toolchain.
To the extent that Markdown is a reaction to any other format, ReStructuredText is probably it rather than AsciiDoc, and RST was mostly used for longform documentation for Python projects.
Markdown's origin story as a format that more-or-less formalized existing ad-hoc conventions used in emails and forums and adding a few more to broaden the utility beyond blog comments is the real story, there wasn't an alternative in use it was competing against.