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Comment by lulle | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand all the fuzz about Markdown. Doesn't people realize that it exists other much more powerful lightweight markup languages like AsciiDoc?

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I've never heard of AsciiDoc, but I'd say the biggest advantage that Markdown has is its ubiquity. It's used by GitHub, StackOverflow, Reddit, and even Tumblr has an option for it.

Also the fact that there are multiple (and good) client-side Markdown libraries while stuff like AsciiDoc generally requires server-side rendering (and the associated server load and round-trip penalties).

Unless I'm missing it, there's no pure client-side AsciiDoc?

[1] seems to be an AsciiDoc render on client-side, though have no idea if it's any good though...

[1]: http://asciidoctor.org/news/2013/05/21/asciidoctor-js-render...

Yeah, hard to say without a live demo. Also, downloading an entire Ruby interpreter in JS seems a little on the heavy side. If you were going to go that route, might as well use texlive.js and get a full-blown LaTeX system. :-)

Cool nonetheless.

I think ubiquity comes with knowledge, if there exists superior tools, people tend to use them eventually. I know that GitHub supports AsciiDoc already, one would hope that the other ones become enlightened!

It was simply the plain-text format I am currently using, I'm sure I can add in compatibility for AsciiDoc no probs. Just a matter of adding in an AsciiDoc renderer. :)

It looks powerful, but with a much steeper learning curve for non technical users[1]. I could see the nested list support being great for outlines, and tables look a lot more robust than in markdown, but I do not know if it is worth the tradeoffs of going against markdown's ubiquity.

[1] http://powerman.name/doc/asciidoc

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