For what it is worth, GitHub supports rendering AsciiDoc. You just have to name your files .adoc I instead of .md

I do have to mention that sometimes advance features have tripped me and I have to spent some time figuring out why. I am sure the cli tools could use help and get better

Agreed. The ease of Markdown, but well structured and complete enough to write a whole book in it. I love it.

I've even fantasized about creating a new AsciiDoc mimetype, called AsciiWeb. It would be a subset of AsciiDoc that is relevant for browsing and would sit somewhere in the middle of Gopher or text browsing on one hand and the "normal" HTML/CSS/Javascript on the other. Very easy to create, suitable for minimal document browsing and structured enough that graphical clients can make it pretty and accessible. Oh wel.. one day I'll get to it.

This is a great idea. Implemented as a browser plug-in that transforms the AsciiDoc the user would control the document, instead of the server/host. Users could set their own fonts and styles, change accessibility, restructure the content, hide blocks/quotes, overlay other data or links, etc...

Changing who controls the content is a feature the web doesn't offer, except to technical people who can F12 to edit.

Yeah. Everyone uses it because it requires the least effort, but on so many levels Markdown is such garbage.

From the different code block implementations, to crappy tables, to trying to indent lists, and so forth.

But it's also the dumbest, lowest common denominator style of text. It's missing almost anything useful.

That it's popular is an insult to anything of quality.

That's what we have though. I don't feel cosy about a text language under stewardship either.

Markdown has a problem with consistency and tables, other than that it is pretty good.

This is because markdown is for simple note taking and is not meant to be rendered.

It wasn’t so long ago that markdown was praised for its simplicity and it’s not for nothing that everyone uses it nowadays.

Considering that the original implementation of Markdown was a Markdown to HTML renderer, your claim that it's not meant to be rendered is a bit suspect.

Agreed. When I actually started using it, I wondered why Markdown is so prevalent when AsciiDoc is a thing.

It feels like they have distinct sweet spots.

Markdown is good if you want simplicity that lets you do headings, emphasis and bold, and gets out of your way. I write fiction in Markdown.

AsciiDoc is good if you want structured documents. I would use it to write a technical manual.

They are not that different, are they? AsciiDoc looks just like an specific dialect of markdown.

Maybe a problem with AsciiDoc is that its name is scary. By the name "ascii" it seems to imply that there is a specific markup for typing non-ascii stuff, instead of simply typing the regular unicode characters (in whatever encoding).

Prevalence of Markdown is to a certain extent accidental. It is one of those many markup languages that are easy-enough to reimplement which helped with the spread and I think it was supported on Github early on.

Asciidoc is much more complex and so we only have 2 implementations around (a2x, asciidoctor).

I think it's an example of a phenomenon where there is a new-ish category of things, and that category is good, and there is one thing in that category that becomes well-known, so even though that thing is not the best in its category, it becomes wildly successful.

Git, in the category of DVCS, is another example.

Thats a very valid comparison I think.

(although I'd argue that git's success stems from not pinning down the workflow early on, like competing DVCS did).

No, problem is the covered complexity. For Markdown I have never resort to any documentation - within its original scope. This is his big advantage and I appreciate this. If you need more, you have almost certainly to look up things. This is true for AsciiDoc as well as for example ReST, the syntax of the former being a bit more appealing to me (just compare simple links for example) .

For this reason, I'm using a blogging system (Pelican) that supports all of them (including Pythons Markdown extensions). I'm completely free to apply the best suiting variant to the topics requirements.

> Maybe a problem with AsciiDoc is that its name is scary.

Exactly. For me the name "ASCII" feels like it is for older UNIX-era system experts.

The name might use to be fancy considering its initial version came out in 2002 (before markdown), but it became an unfortunate name.

Or reStructuredText, or Org-Mode : ) I think there are multiple great alternatives to markdown. Markdown is like the smallest common subset of features, that is never quite satisfying.