On 5 Mar 2010, at 20:15, Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:
> I don't think Markdown or reST (which Sphinx uses) are fundamentally better
> than the wiki markup.
The only two things any "plain text" HTML syntax adds are:
* An enforced set of elements a user can add
* Significant newlines
The rest is invariably a lossy and incomplete reformulation of HTML into a
"plain text" alternative.
The elephant in the room: HTML is already plain text, well known, and damn
simple.
We're moving the CouchDB book from a "plain text" format to HTML for precisely
these reason. Not only did we have to constantly look up anything more advanced
than a paragraph or hyperlink, there were all kinds of ugly edge cases where
some blockquote example had a backtick that flipped some rendering flag and
clobbered the rest of the line.
Never again.
