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by dt3ft·6y ago·view on hn ↗
Agreed, but what else is there for simple formatting like headings, bold, underline, img? I had to go with markdown because I could not find anything else out there.
4 comments
I would recommend AsciiDoctor: https://asciidoctor.org/
Sweet, had no idea that existed. Will check it out soon!
Sadly, there no any Qt-based editor for AsciiDoctor, such as Ghostwriter or ReText for Markdown.
Another great alternative is Wikitext used by the Wikipedia (among many others) see https://www.wikipedia.org or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikitext

PS: Why not have the best of both worlds, that is, Markdown and Wikitext? Yes, you can; see Texti (Text with Formatting Instructions) - https://texti.github.io

Texti is yours? It looks like an interesting experiment. Lots of good ideas in it, though it gets way too unfocused/wip in the second half of the document, especially in some areas like the "blocks". (Also your emojis are broken)

Having hash line comments is probably a non-starter in a text format (the latex % syntax is probably a better idea indeed if you want line comments). Also the -- strikethrough -- syntax will probably conflict too much. You want comments to use a syntax which is otherwise nearly unused.

Thanks for your kind words (yes, sorry for the missing disclaimer). Texti is slowly evolving :-) The point is NOT to invent new syntax [1], thus, using the established unix-style/shell-style/python-style/ruby-style for comments. For a litte real world examples that generated HTML, LaTeX and Markdown from Texti see https://github.com/texti/texti.github.io/tree/master/samples

PS: The main missing feature (among others) in Markdown and that rocks Wikitext (and Texti too) is built-in (recursive) templates (with optional parameters) using the {{}} syntax.

[1]: I know % is not new because it's used in LaTeX but LaTeX is esoteric compared to Python, Ruby, Shell Scripts, Unix Configs, etc.

Yeah I figured, and I personally really like # for comments in code, but here's a list of reasons why I don't think hash as comment in text is workable, in practice:

#1: That's the only reason.

FYI: # is already "reserved" in markdown for headings. So in theory markdown is also not workable, in practice :-).

It's kind of like:

1. FC Köln - that's a football club name (and not a list marker). Try it in markdown - same gotcha :-)

Well, that's true, you have a point there ;) It's probably my bias talking. Good luck with the project; I love Markdown, but it's great that other people are exploring alternatives.
Why not plain html? For simple formatting like you mention, it really is simple, and it has all the power you could want if you want if you to go further.
Plain HTML is super verbose for basic text formatting. Having to wrap every paragraph is super annoying UX.
HTML5 is not all that verbose. You can omit closing tags for many elements (for example, </p>, </li> and </td>). Many other tags are also implicitly opened, like <body> and the like. I actually prefer it to markdown for most cases.
Is that a spec or it just happens?
Part of the spec, and recommender by many people.

For some examples of modern html, see google's style guide for html, section 3.1.7 shows an example of a complete and correct document that may blow your mind. Also, the examples of tables and lists without closing elements:

https://google.github.io/styleguide/htmlcssguide.html

It sounds good in theory, but in practice it adds a huge mental overhead.

> A p element's end tag may be omitted if the p element is immediately followed by an address, article, aside, blockquote, details, div, dl, fieldset, figcaption, figure, footer, form, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, header, hgroup, hr, main, menu, nav, ol, p, pre, section, table, or ul element, or if there is no more content in the parent element and the parent element is an HTML element that is not an a, audio, del, ins, map, noscript, or video element, or an autonomous custom element.

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/syntax.html#syntax-ta...

This is so complicated. In the end it's easier for me to close the tag instead of second guessing if I may skip it or may not.

In practice you can always skip the closing p tag. The difference is inconsequential (it only matters for the whitespace).
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/
If I want to convert my work to PDF or MS Word format, that's easy to do if I've used markdown, due to the existence of converters. If the document is written in html, the conversion is more difficult. Any html extensions that need to be converted by hand stand out in a markdown document.