While you see yourself as objecting to Markdown, I see you as objecting to other templating languages. For example, a PHP file can do what you are doing, but it

While you see yourself as objecting to Markdown, I see you as objecting to other templating languages. For example, a PHP file can do what you are doing, but it will have the full feature set of PHP available and it doesn't necessarily have a great API for working with a DOM. You could say the same of something like Apache Velocity. Of course, there are a lot of template languages out there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_template_engines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_template_engi... and I don't know how yours compares to the best of them, but the problem you're tackling is different from the problem that Markdown is tackling. Let's not forget all the static site generators: http://staticsitegenerators.net/ http://staticsitegenerators.net/ The main strengths of Markdown are simplicity, readability, and standard feature set. Markdown is entirely usable without being transformed into HTML. Plus, the lack of extensibility means that services like GitHub can enable pretty views of Markdown documents without having to process costly and/or dangerous user-provided extensions. Once you introduce variables and calculations and lookups into a DOM, you largely lose all that and you have something entirely different.