I get the feeling this is one of the reasons John Gruber was so annoyed by the CommonMark effort - he felt his invention, the thing he called 'Markdown', was th

I get the feeling this is one of the reasons John Gruber was so annoyed by the CommonMark effort - he felt his invention, the thing he called 'Markdown', was the idea of a human-friendly pidgin syntax for a more complex markup format. His personal Markdown implementation happened to target HTML, because that's what he personally needed, but I guess he expected all kinds of markdowns for all kinds of document syntaxes, with varying similarity to the one he wrote himself. The idea of constraining Markdown to one particular syntax targeting one particular document type must have seemed like epically missing the point... which is a common outcome when a new idea meets popular approval. From that point of view, Markdown's nearest relative would be AsciiDoc, which is a toolkit for making simple pidgins for the DocBook XML syntax. That tool happens to come with some reasonable defaults you can use as a base, but sure enough there's now the AsciiDoctor tool, which hard-codes AsciiDoc's defaults instead of re-implementing the generic framework.