> Whatever the ruby markdown library did ... FYI John Gruber's original Markdown.PL is written in Perl [1] not Ruby. > ... things like [...] HTML [...] even h

> Whatever the ruby markdown library did ... FYI John Gruber's original Markdown.PL is written in Perl [1] not Ruby. > ... things like [...] HTML [...] even have IETF or W3C specifications nowadays. HTML was originally designed as an SGML vocabulary [2], and had SGML DTDs by IETF and W3C for the longest time [3] (albeit somewhat defective from the beginning, and grew a number of warts over time). The beauty of Markdown IMO is that it's specified as a short syntax for HTML, with the option to include inline HTML where the fragment covered by Markdown is insufficient. That's exactly the model supported by SGML's SHORTREF feature which lets you define context-dependent tokens SGML will replace into canonical angle-bracket markup. So if you're looking for a document preparation system that lets you write casual text a la Markdown (or your own customized or novel syntax), then can translate that syntax into predictable markup and goes all the way to support complex document integrations with established XML tool chains, etc. etc. and can also import/produce HTML, then there's always SGML, based on an ISO standard even. [1]: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ [2]: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/MarkUp.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/MarkUp.html [3]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1866 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1866