Beyond Markdown (2018)

I like Markdown as is from a writing perspective. I wrote a recursive descent Markdown parser for a project recently, and I quickly realized how painfully ambiguous Markdown is. Lists (specifically nested lists) are the worst offenders.

Despite CommonMark, I find that many common Markdown parsers tend to "do it their own way" when it comes to edge cases. So I like this. This seems less ambiguous and easier to parse. But I don't think I'm going to be switching from regular Markdown anytime soon.

Most people just need headers, links, code fences. If you want footnotes, use LaTeX.

Markdown succeeded not because it was perfect, but because it was “good enough” and easy to remember. Every attempt to “fix” it by bolting on specs or extensions ends up missing the point: people don’t want a universal document format, they want something they can type without thinking.