strictdown

ane built a formalized comparison tool⁵, but as of yet, there is no joint effort to cooperate on a lightweight markup standard. There are a few interesting projects that dare to forsake Markdown and try their luck: Fountain.io⁶ (a domain specific light markup language for playwriting), SkrivML⁷, Strictdown⁸, and z.m.l.⁹ Then there are, of course, the many predecessors of Markdown, which prove that Markdown (or light-markup in general) is not the imprescriptible privilege of its self-proclaimed benevolent dictator for life, and some of which are still widely used in various communities: Setext (1992), AFT (1999), Grutatxt (2000), AsciiDoc (2002), MediaWiki (2002), reStructuredText (2002), Org-mode (2003), Textile (2004)… We need an extensible lightweight markup language of sorts, a “lxml”, if you will, and we need to work on it together. If we want ever to succeed in establishing a true standard light markup language, the big challenge is not only to focus on extensibility, but also to reconcile the various existing and future syntaxes, and take care of backward-compatibility (with plain Markdown), as much as possible. As mentioned by quite a few commenters here and elsewhere, weeding out conflicting syntax should be the first thing to do. For starters, I begun a concordance¹⁰, listing the various delimiters and patterns used by competing lightweight markup languages. (Very rough draft, though, and need to think about a way to formalize the data, to make more accurate comparisons, and consequently, better decisions on the syntax of a future xlml.) ¹ http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-future-of-markdown/ ² https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources ³ http://www.wilfred.me.uk/blog/2012/07/30/why-markdown-is-not... ⁴ https://medium.com/the-future-of-publishing/495ccfe24a52 ⁵ http://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2/faq.html#what-are-some-... ⁶ http://fountain.io ⁷ SkrivML ⁸ https://github.com/jakwings/strictdown ⁹ http://www.z-m-l.com ¹⁰ https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources/blob/master/l...