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Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

How about a minimal set of asciidoc markup that gives people whatever warm feeling they get out of markdown, but has the benefit of being pretty consistently specified, allowing you to set variables (like multimarkdown), and allowing you to create finished documents in the same style in which you created your scratch documents?

http://powerman.name/doc/asciidoc-compact.html

I'm probably tone-deaf on something here, because I simply don't understand the appeal of the format.

edit - asciidoc talk: https://plus.google.com/114112334290393746697/posts/CdXJt6hV...

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> whatever warm feeling they get out of markdown

The warm feeling I get is that it's the syntax I use all day on reddit and GitHub. The syntax could be a mixture of Perl, non-printing characters, Emoji, and a Turing-complete sublanguage, and I'd still use it.

Familiarity trumps all other merits. The easiest language to learn and use is the one I've already learned.

Is reddit the secret here? I didn't know that reddit took markdown input (not a reddit user.)

Asciidoc works on github, too: http://asciidoctor.org/news/2013/01/30/asciidoc-returns-to-g...

edit: Thanks Titanous - I assumed it was an optional text filter or something for general use.

I don't know that reddit's a secret, but it certainly uses markdown.

Which is key among the reasons I _vastly_ prefer composing longer-form content there than on G+, which has its own bastardized, incomplete, inconsistent, buggy, poorly-parsed tagging format.

Though I do wish that Markdown used the G+ syntax for bold vs. italic:

    *This is bold*
    _This is italic_

I find markdown's doubled-character syntax ugly, and have my own convention of:

   _Markdown italic, ALWAYS_
   **Markdown bold, ALWAYS**

Visually it's far more distinctive.

Asciidoc (and the myriad of other markup languages that are supported in their file rendering) is not supported in comments/issues/pull requests, only "GitHub Flavored Markdown".

The appeal is twofold: a lot of engines now understand it and it is (relatively) easy to write by hand. (Except for the bloody links, writing the HTML for them is much easier than the equivalent markdown, I do it infrequently enough that I always mix up the brackets or the order (or both...).)

The way to remember it is just that you're parenthesizing the URL. Naturally, you might write it "look at this thing (http://example.com)" - in Markdown, you do the same, but with brackets to indicate where you want the link to show up. "look at [this thing](http://example.com)"

I don't buy for a second that <a href="http://example.com">this thing</a> is more intuitive than that, even if you disagree about the specific brackets used.

"a href" isn't intuitive, but it's memorable.

Yeah, honestly, I think more verbose formatting is much easier to remember than a bunch of punctuation.

The way I remember it is that it looks like function call. so () is at the end thus [] must be first :)

[this links looks like function in most languages](link function argument)

I understand the herd effect - so I put it in user-facing projects that I'm working on - but I don't understand what's driving the herd. Specifically, I don't see any advantages over asciidoc and find it awful to work with.

edit: I do understand this project, though. It'll get rid of the horribleness in implementing markdown, at least.

> I don't see any advantages over asciidoc

Reddit uses Markdown. GitHub uses Markdown. HN (sorta) uses Markdown. Wordpress, Tumblr, and Discourse all use Markdown. If I used Markdown for my own User-Generated-Content Textareas™, people might already know it.

If I use Asciidoc, I may as well be using SGML. It's just another (nice!) syntax you're forcing people to cram into their brains.

I'd never heard of asciidoc before this thread. I suspect asciidoc suffered from being associated with docbook? And perhaps it's just that Perl was much more popular for writing forums in than Python, at the time.

Actually, as a C++11 user, it's a lot like a lambda declaration: [capture](parameters){…}. Certainly the brackets are in the same order. The similarity between lambdas and Markdown URL's is actually a nice feedback loop when I'm doing C++11 code.

Square the circle! [] () Just like the old geometry problem. :)

Nice mnemonic. I'll try to remember that.

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