I absolutely love AsciiDoc. Basing it on DocBook was a brilliant idea and gives it a solid foundation.
I have a few radical ideas for the next version of AsciiDoc (“AsciiDoc 2”). If you would, please hear me out and tell me what you think: Which of them work and which of them don’t? Main idea: I’m using both Markdown and AsciiDoc. When I work with the former, I miss AsciiDoc’s power. When I work with the latter, I miss Markdown’s broad support. That got me thinking: why not merge the two? They are so similar already. The current situation is as follows: * Markdown is immensely popular and used for many projects: for documentation on GitHub, for blogging, for book publishing (LeanPub), etc. On the other hand, its scope is limited, it is not well suited for books and there are many competing and incompatible extensions (GitHub-flavored Markdown, Kramdown, MultiMarkdown, Maruku, etc.). * AsciiDoc has everything that Markdown is missing. Merging the two would give people the best of both worlds: For simple things, one could use the widely-supported Markdown. For books (etc.) one could profit from AsciiDoc’s extensive experience with sophisticated projects. Given that there is no clear standard for a “Markdown for books”, AsciiDoc would be a convenient upgrade path for Markdown and could become very popular. Or rather, even more popular. Given that there are a few incompatibilities, I’m not sure how to best merge Markdown and AsciiDoc. One option is to maintain AsciiDoc 1 and AsciiDoc 2 separately. A few more wishes for version 2: * Improve the parser. It feels like it could be much faster. And more consistent. For example, escaping is currently context-sensitive (you have to take into consideration whether you’ve escaped somewhere else in the same line), which is unpleasant and user-unfriendly. I also think backticks should work with suffixed apostrophes. Currently, I need work-arounds such as ++foo++’s, beacuse `foo`’s doesn’t work. * Support indented paragraphs. These are especially handy for presenting math. * Improve the support for math. Especially latexmath:[] is brilliant, but it prevents you from using the dollar sign elsewhere in the HTML generated directly by AsciiDoc. * Possibly: more named constructs. Beyond the basics, I find ASCII symbols hard to remember. Named constructs, such as named blocks, work better. What do you think? Do these ideas make sense? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "asciidoc" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/asciidoc. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
