While I agree with many of the points, the proposal that we need a a new standard based on HTML is a bit weird. I guess the author hasn't read the HTML5 spec wh

While I agree with many of the points, the proposal that we need a a new standard based on HTML is a bit weird. I guess the author hasn't read the HTML5 spec which is a total monstrosity and suffers from problems similar to Markdown. If you want a document format where essentially every document is valid, you have to specify each and every corner case which gets messy very quickly. Just look at the HTML5 spec. To my knowledge, there isn't even a formal, unambigious Markdown spec. CommonMark comes closest, but it's still a mostly informal spec often based on examples. In my opinion, the best option is still XML, or better yet some slimmed down version without DTDs and with a saner solution for namespaces.