recommonmark

First, there is commonmark that is trying to standardize markdown. There is also recommonmark which will parse commonmark for sphinx: https://github.com/rtfd/recommonmark However, commonmark currently lack support for tables, so I fall back on rst for tables(actually I think the syntax for tables in rst is much better than tables in other markdown flavors). Also, resolving links using commonmark in sphinx is a mess, right now. I actually extended recommonmark so sphinx will properly resolve cross references(including reference to elements in a domain). However, I had to update sphinx as well, which I have a PR open with no response from them, here: https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx/pull/2644 It seems unfortunate that sphinx devs are unresponsive to contributions. The devs for mkdocs are a lot more responsive, but seem more interested i

Sphinx, or rather Docutils, does eat Markdown now: https://github.com/rtfd/recommonmark There is no access to Sphinx's directives/extensions, as it implements Commonmark support, which doesn't yet offer an extension syntax as part of the spec. Once it does, writing in Markdown will me more useful, but currently it's limited to basic markup and naive linking.