MarkDown

ThoughtStorms Wiki

Another SmartAscii format : http://daringfireball.net/2004/03/diveintomarkdown

Now used here in CardiganBay (with some custom additions.)

I made a tweet which I think is a crucial insight for me:

When I talk about "Markdown" I tend to think of it rather like the programming language Lisp: not as a completely fixed specification but as a great general idea awith some strong conventions but also with some dialect variants.
Cardigan Bay has extended MD with custom syntax but still sound to keep to the spirit and major of virtues I see in Markdown.

https://twitter.com/interstar/status/1667905743868121088

Let's develop that further :

The core of Lisp is a general and minimal syntax for function representation and an execution model for function application.

It's the simplest syntax that could possibly work for this task.

In the same way, I think of Markdown as a minimal set of SmartAscii features to make nicely formatted documents and hypertexts out of plain text. Which are sufficiently readable and editable even when not rendered.

I'm not defending the exact syntax of MD, though I think it's fine. Just as with Lisp, I'm not obsessed about 100% compatibility. I like the ClojureLanguage dialect of Lisp, but I'm happy when I see SchemeLanguage. And can adapt my thinking from one to the other fairly easily. Similarly I customise MD myself. (eg. my DoubleComma format) and I'm very happy about it. I think others should have that right as long as their innovations stick to the same principles : that they are light-weight / easy to use; and that they look OK (or intelligible) when there is no special rendering available for them.