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It's a real shame that Markdown beat out AsciiDoc(tor). The original AsciiDoc project was even released before Markdown. But compared to Markdown, Asciidoctor m

It's a real shame that Markdown beat out AsciiDoc(tor). The original AsciiDoc project was even released before Markdown. But compared to Markdown, Asciidoctor makes it just as easy to write simple formatted text; makes it far easier to write complicated markup such as definition lists and tables; supports common article-authoring features like a table of contents, footnotes, and inclusion of other documents; supports the use of simple variables that get expanded when the document is rendered; supports anchors and CSS-style classes; provides an API for user-authored extensions (in Ruby, for Asciidoctor) to customize document processing; and renders to an intermediate format not coupled to any one output format. I cringe whenever I have to write markdown. It's such a bad format, and it's a shame that people tried to keep bolting on additional features it wasn't meant to support instead of just picking a better option. I wonder if John Gruber even knew about AsciiDoc when he started work on Markdown, and if he would have gone to the trouble if he had.

castillar76 5y ago
I kind of agree, although I find them useful for different things. Markdown is terrific for casual text entry that needs a little bit of markup—being able to add italics or bold or a formatted link inside of comments or discussions is really handy, and it works well in chat clients and GitHub and things like that. Where Markdown falls down is when people try to apply it to larger, more formal documents that need specific formatting choices: footnotes, specific list layouts, table line breaks, etc. Once you get up to trying to publish a more complicated document, you find the edges of Markdown pretty quickly. I would say "right tool for the right job", but the problem is that once devs get used to one format, they don't want to learn another.

castillar76 5y ago

I kind of agree, although I find them useful for different things. Markdown is terrific for casual text entry that needs a little bit of markup—being able to add italics or bold or a formatted link inside of comments or discussions is really handy, and it works well in chat clients and GitHub and things like that. Where Markdown falls down is when people try to apply it to larger, more formal documents that need specific formatting choices: footnotes, specific list layouts, table line breaks, etc. Once you get up to trying to publish a more complicated document, you find the edges of Markdown pretty quickly. I would say "right tool for the right job", but the problem is that once devs get used to one format, they don't want to learn another.