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Comment by dschuessler | Hacker News Reader

I recently found out that the author is John MacFarlane, a philosophy professor I have read papers from in totally unrelated contexts. I was more than surprised to see that he is the original author of pandoc. It boggles my mind how someone with an academic career in a somewhat unrelated field can have a GitHub profile like him. It's really impressive.

On topic, though, preceding sublists with empty lines is a complete non-starter for me. However, since I don't hard-wrap lines (goal 7), but use soft-wrap only, I am not in the target audience anyways.

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> I recently found out that the author is John MacFarlane, a philosophy professor I have read papers from in totally unrelated contexts. I was more than surprised to see that he is the original author of pandoc.

Professor MacFarlane must have really hated writing his papers in Latex.

He is also the author of the CommonMark spec: https://spec.commonmark.org/0.30/, https://commonmark.org

RE goal 7: here is my questioning of that goal and JGM's response, my counter, etc: https://talk.commonmark.org/t/djot-a-light-markup-language-b....

I get the thrust of "not wanting to pay for hard-wrapping" but I'm not sure I understand what you think a better design would be; does a single newline always introduce a new block element?

No. Within a paragraph it would introduce a hard line break, e.g. like you'd use for poetry. You'd use two line breaks, i.e. a blank line, to start a new paragraph.

In other words, the plain text analog to WYSIWYG.

I've decided to go all-in on djot for my software.

> On topic, though, preceding sublists with empty lines is a complete non-starter for me.

I get it. This is my biggest complaint too. But I'm also a parser writer, and I see how this removes so much ambiguity.

This is the one thing that will stop djot adoption, and I'm okay with that. I don't think djot will be as used as Markdown, and I'm okay with that.

Yeah that stuck out to me as the most objectionable thing at first glance too. Otherwise it looks reasonably sane. I currently use AsciiDoc and it's ok but this looks slightly better I would say.

Both are clearly better than RST.

Good sign of a persistent yak-shaver :)

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