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How do you improve on Markdown or simplify it? They seem different axis to me, markdown is already as basic as it gets.
by childintime 1mo ago
How do you improve on Markdown or simplify it? They seem different axis to me, markdown is already as basic as it gets.
- tel 1mo agoIn short, simplify the design to make it more reasonable for multiple implementations to agree while also adding intentional extensibility points and a governance model that allows for dialects to form without fracturing the community. Markdown is really interesting. For most readers and most writers it's dead simple and you just get the idea from a few examples or reading a short description. In practice, it's dozens of dialects (though 3 related ones dominate) and dozens more implementations. It's hard to write new, compatible implementations, so they tend to fracture. (This may be less true with LLMs nowadays, but it might also be worse.) Often, someone wants to write a Markdown variant because they wish it supported some new extension to help it mesh with the use case and tool they are envisioning. Each one of these is a new fracture. My goal is a simple specification that's easy to reimplement that eliminates years of cruft and subtle complexity. I'm designing it to be simple and obvious to extend and building a governance model so that extensions can live together, grow, maybe even become mainstream all without ever breaking compatibility.