Thoughts on, and beyond markdown

Knut Melvær, Thoughts On Markdown, 2022

As I add progressively more structure to the ‘data’ that backs this website — more strictly defining relationships between documents — it makes sense to consider what the constraining effects the use of any given markup format has on my ability to encode (and subsequently, decode) document structure, intra-document relationships, etc.

Knut makes a pretty thorough summary of markdowns defects, his thoughts about it being “a hassle to parse and validate, even with great tooling” echoes my same feeling.

I agree that block centric editing experiences offer a solution to many of markdowns painful limitations, but it’s an evolution that must be pursued carefully, I love the accessibility of plaintext.

John MacFarlane explored similar territory in Beyond Markdown

I’m exploring this same space in my own projects. Relevant proposals:

• SEP 13: Switch to a more reasonable source markup language
• SEP 42: Expose Abstract Syntax Tree (AST)