Imho Markdown is a overall terrible and (especially regarding technical writing!) very limited format. But nothing else seems popular. Why actually?
Are there any realistic alternatives?
Thanks for some hints!
If you aren't trying to build a SPA or something like that and you just want to mark up some text for formatted output ... HTML is kinda made for that task.
That being said, I tend to stick with Markdown since I find angle bracket tags to be noisy and distracting when I view documents in plain text.
It’s just plain old dumb boring static text that is being moved around the web.
The internet was essentially created so that CERN could share plain old text documents with others remotely.
Why do I need a big bloated overly complicated PHP webserver that talks to an overly complicated database, when it’s just plain old static text after all?
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVtKhBrRV_ZkPnBtt_TD1Cs9P...
Form the alternatives I've seen so far it looks best. But EMACS? (I'm on Linux, but never liked EMACS or Vi(m)).
The second best looking alternative seems AsciiDoc. It has some more tooling as I see it.
But really like the .org syntax best so far. So any recommendations for tooling?
Does Markdown have footnotes or endnotes? No?
People are still misusing it for everything! Especially for technical writing, which is just nuts.
Personally I'm happy for it because it'll finally stop programming languages from inventing their own domain-specific oddly-syntaxed subset of HTML; the way Rust uses it is something others have no reason not to copy. For your own technical writing, AsciiDoc works pretty well.
I think markdown's popularity comes from its simplicity. For things like bulleted lists, especially nested ones, I can just type an asterisk and keep going. The raw input is still very readable (for the most part) and adding formatting is quick and easy. For anything basic - such as chat systems, social media posts/comments, or quick note systems - I don't think anything more is needed.
Something like reStructuredText (.rst) is a similar alternative, but I think that if you're irritated by the limits of Markdown then rST isn't going to be any better. If you really want good formatting options, then LaTeX is the best I can think of at the moment.