markdown is exactly the kind of minimalism i hate, it is more restrictive than simplifying.

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

markdown is exactly the kind of minimalism i hate, it is more restrictive than simplifying. actually i am fine with markdown so long as it is not parsed by a markdown parser -- it makes a lot more sense as a *microsyntax* and not an actual markup language. you can encode some limited semantics with it (things like emphasis), but you cannot encode any significant structure except what might be inferred implicitly by e.g. heading levels. i would not want to author everything in markdown.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@trwnh yeah, and that's kind of exactly the original design plan for markdown: just something basic that would beautiful text emails and such.

For more serious work, things like AsciiDoc are much better.

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

@oblomov that's not how it's used nowadays though. maybe in an alternate timeline markdown would have evolved more in the direction of NFO files or the ascii art headers you would see at the top of gamefaqs walkthroughs, instead of people treating it like you can write blog posts in it

i went into more detail in a subthread with someone else on followers-only scope but basically i would in almost every case prefer either plain text or HTML

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

so if you rip out the markdown parser and treat markdown as a set of conventions instead of a codified language, then which conventions actually make sense to keep? if you're just concerned with visual appearance, i guess you can do whatever you want as long as it isn't parsed. but then what do you *actually* need to parse? i'd say the main/only thing i care for is links -- i want to be able to make consistent references between notes etc. markdown links are ambiguous with paraphrasing quotes...

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

i am aware of the following link syntaxes:
- markdown []
- wiki [[]]
- html a with href
- rfc uris <>

html is the most unambiguous but also significantly more verbose. if we want to use a microsyntax for links within plain text that can be parsed without ambiguity, then wiki links might also work because double square brackets are not commonly used for anything else like single square brackets are. i suppose <> could be extended to allow more than just uris, but <> might appear as non-links too

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

<thing> seems quite natural if coming from turtle as well. i'm not sure if this is a good thing or bad thing yet; i may want to commonly embed turtle or a similar convention to talk about subjects without necessarily having them be links? also might be tricky to deal with escaping if converted to html?

another thing to consider: # similar to hashtags but generalized to allow any string? #<> could do that. or maybe *<> á la c-style pointers?

no further thoughts yet and about to sleep, so later…

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@trwnh there's also the Gemtext convention of NOT putting links in text, but after the paragraph (although arguably that's cheating) and the AsciiDoc approach of just putting the link (only works with known protocols though). AsciiDoc actually does something interesting: it will recognize <>-wrapped URIs too and strip the <> in that case.