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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

I’d say Markdown meets every one of those criteria except “more features” (which is a feature IMO) and “easier to monetise” (which is another feature. :D )

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You mention it fails number 5, but I think Markdown also fails number 4. It’s pretty restrictive with the types of documents it can create. It’s HTML and traditional web technologies that gives it the illusion of flexibility.

To be displayed in a pleasing way to most humans, it’s also rendered as HTML, usually with some kind of styling. In a world without HTML, what is Markdown going to use?

LaTeX? That's actually the primary use case I've seen for markdown -- to write papers/presentations/code notebooks in markdown that are then turned into LaTeX for typesetting.

Sorry, I meant one of the early X-Window predecessors from the Alto era- I don't remember which one(s), but it had a pixel perfect rendering aspect that appeared at least much lower level and the GUI used far less memory. The most recent one that resembled that is X11R1, which I have tested on a VM linux image from ~2005, called Xwoaf.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#History I recall some pdfs of the Xeroc PARC showed more info on it.

Edit: I might have confused LaTex with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP. I think it was more efficient in handling data, but then again, platforms age whenever a new application needs more memory, so they got abandoned because it was more efficient to bundle it into something like Wayland...

Possibly Interpress, a precursor to PostScript.

Otherwise the Alto used Bravo and Gypsy for WYSIWYG typesetting:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto>

Yes, that's it- Interpress/PostScript. I remember Forth used it. There's something about the typesetting that I love and can't figure out. But I notice it, even on old monitors. Wonderful stuff. I really like the DTSN displays too: https://retro.swarm.cz/20170902/1143/

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