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Comment by geraldbauer | Hacker News Reader

So how is:

.Ordered

. number

  .. letter

  .. letter

better and more readable than

1. number

2. number

   a. letter

   b. letter

For sure Markdown has some cruft but isn't it better to improve Markdown itself than to try to "establish" a completly new format with some weird conventions such as:

Level 3 Heading

^^^^^^^

Level 4 Heading

+++++++++++++++

Why? ^^ or ++ is this in any way intuitive or an established convention that is so much better?

PS: See Text with Instructions (.texti) for a (better) Markdown evolved variant / flavor :-) - https://texti.github.io

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> So how is (X) better? For sure Markdown has some cruft but isn't it better to improve Markdown itself than to try to "establish" a completly new format

> PS: See Text with Instructions (.texti) for a (better) Markdown evolved variant / flavor

You have answered yourself: markdown is not a language that can be improved, it's a mashup of several different slightly incompatible implementations, much like HTML in the early web during browser wars.

You could try to create a standard body that defined a homogeneous definition that everybody adheres to and which could be extended with new features.

But by that time you'd be better served off by using asciidoc, which already did that job and which is actually based on Docbook, supporting all the features of that complete standard for book publishing.

Sorry you are misreading and misstating what I said - markdown is a language and can of course be improved as many flavors / dialects / extensions and so on proof. Evolution is usually way better in finding conventions than your top-down Docbook in Ascii (Asciidoc) flavor. Again (re)read the post above and tell me how the Asciidoc ordered list using . and .. is more readable or the heading level 3 or 4 using ^^ or ++ and so on.

> post above and tell me how the Asciidoc ordered list using . and .. is more readable

It isn't - the point is that asciidoc has a 'spec' whereas markdown has dialects because it's not rigourously specified (core or extensions). Which one you might run into is the luck of the draw.

Should you try to improve markdown (and lots of people have), you end up with the N+1 standards problem (famous xkcd cartoon) and further fragmenting the implementation if at all it takes off.

Getting one 'Markdown' that has features (and extensions) that work properly wherever you go isn't a technical problem . It's a problem created by the lack of a spec in the first place and IMO pretty much unsolvable now.

I don't think that your examples for asciidoc are quite correct.

Ordered lists do not need ".Ordered" to begin (https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-syntax-quick-reference... scroll down a little). You don't need the leading spaces for sublists either.

I'll grant you that the period is a little more annoying than the numbers, but it's honestly not a big deal, and also means that long lists (longer than 10 elements) have consistent spacing.

For headers, you don't need those different formats (https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-syntax-quick-reference...). It's just equal signs the whole way.

It's better because it's specified.

This is a case of, "It doesn't matter what side of the road you drive on, as long as everyone drives on the same side."

Your link asks repeatedly whether we've learned anything over the last 10+ years. One thing we've learned over the last 10+ years is that underspecified organically emergent "standards" result in a bunch of inconsistent behavior that confuses users.

I won't claim that AsciiDoc fixes the problem--it would need to be adopted more widely and it's not really trying to do the same thing as Markdown--it's not trying to make something that's both readable as plain text and generatable into rich text. But simply focusing on some aesthetic qualities of the markup shows you aren't really understanding the problem with Markdown.

The first example is nice because you don't have to change all of the numbers around every time you add/remove an entry from the list. But I don't like having to put the ".Ordered" before every ordered list, and in Markdown I think it will automatically make the numbering sequential if the source isn't anyways.

Yeah you can number everything as 1. In markdown and it will work, but if you want the source to also be readable, which is the point of markdown, the numbers should match.

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