I don't think Markdown is the right language to solve these problems. As you've noted, it's not standardised at all, and you'd have to pick an interpreter that

I don't think Markdown is the right language to solve these problems. As you've noted, it's not standardised at all, and you'd have to pick an interpreter that everyone could agree on (and that means C). Markdown also doesn't do semantic references. It does do plain links, you can give them a title; or you can use a default title, so perhaps you could infer the semantics from the context, maybe like: Use the flag [-R][] to recursively apply to all files and subdirectories. Please refer to [chmod(2)][] for the details. But that feels like overloading one kind of syntax with so many different meanings. Take HTML as a counterexample, it has <link rel="...">, which fits neatly into the rest of the language. Why do these semantics matter? Well, you can obviously render roff into HTML and browse the man pages online; also, someone ought to write a simple and smart pager that can follow these references (Emacs doesn't count as simple). Anything that aims to replace roff should preserve its most important features, have a proper formal spec, and be easy to write a parser for - in super plain dumb C/flex/yacc.