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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.

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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!

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