I know everybody knows markdown and markdown is simple, but I have seen so many people who ended up with HTML hacks for more "advanced" features like image size/position, complex tables, and even comments.
I higly recommend trying AsciiDoc to people who needs more features than Markdown.
Also, it is much more PDF-friendly than Markdown so that you don't need weird renderer workarounds to print.
I do have to mention that sometimes advance features have tripped me and I have to spent some time figuring out why. I am sure the cli tools could use help and get better
I've even fantasized about creating a new AsciiDoc mimetype, called AsciiWeb. It would be a subset of AsciiDoc that is relevant for browsing and would sit somewhere in the middle of Gopher or text browsing on one hand and the "normal" HTML/CSS/Javascript on the other. Very easy to create, suitable for minimal document browsing and structured enough that graphical clients can make it pretty and accessible. Oh wel.. one day I'll get to it.
Changing who controls the content is a feature the web doesn't offer, except to technical people who can F12 to edit.
From the different code block implementations, to crappy tables, to trying to indent lists, and so forth.
But it's also the dumbest, lowest common denominator style of text. It's missing almost anything useful.
That it's popular is an insult to anything of quality.
That's what we have though. I don't feel cosy about a text language under stewardship either.
It wasn’t so long ago that markdown was praised for its simplicity and it’s not for nothing that everyone uses it nowadays.
Maybe a problem with AsciiDoc is that its name is scary. By the name "ascii" it seems to imply that there is a specific markup for typing non-ascii stuff, instead of simply typing the regular unicode characters (in whatever encoding).
Asciidoc is much more complex and so we only have 2 implementations around (a2x, asciidoctor).
Git, in the category of DVCS, is another example.
(although I'd argue that git's success stems from not pinning down the workflow early on, like competing DVCS did).
Exactly. For me the name "ASCII" feels like it is for older UNIX-era system experts.
The name might use to be fancy considering its initial version came out in 2002 (before markdown), but it became an unfortunate name.
For this reason, I'm using a blogging system (Pelican) that supports all of them (including Pythons Markdown extensions). I'm completely free to apply the best suiting variant to the topics requirements.
Markdown is good if you want simplicity that lets you do headings, emphasis and bold, and gets out of your way. I write fiction in Markdown.
AsciiDoc is good if you want structured documents. I would use it to write a technical manual.