[pindab0ter]

Other than inertia, what is keeping AsciiDoc from overtaking Markdown?

Personally I like the ubiquity and simplicity of Markdown, but I can also see the benefits of the features AsciiDoc has to offer.

[latexr]

> Other than inertia

Why does there need to be something else? That’s a powerful reason.

Markdown is subpar and has an awful steward—as evidenced by all the different “flavours” and degrees of support in existence—but we somehow made it work in a jumble of hacks and that’s what we have now. It’s crummy but gets the job done.

Even if AsciiDoc is technically superior, which it probably is, is it superior enough to justify the big players implementing and pushing for in more in places regular users have access too?

[somat]

Opposing goals, the purpose of markdown is to have a nice looking plain text document that can be automatically typeset and asciidoc is to have a well structured plain text document that can be automaticly typeset.

Note that markdown's whole value proposition is that it is a nice looking plaintext format, it stinks at adding any sort of semantic value to a document. realistically if you care about your documentation you will use something better than markdown. The problem is adding better structure always makes the plain text ugly and hard to read, violating the whole point of markdown. that is to say, the many efforts to add better semantics to markdown don't appear to understand the point of markdown.

[Freak_NL]

The name doesn't help.

ASCII, by way of that character encoding standard, implies that dark age before writing and transmitting 'café' or 'Warschauer Straße' or '€10' or '¡olé!' just worked. Not a great marketing point.

So the first thing you are wondering when you read 'AsciiDoc' is, “Wait, does this mean it doesn't support anything but ASCII characters?”, regardless of whether or not that is true.

[xeonmc]

Ruby.

[pindab0ter]

What do you mean? Is Ruby helping or preventing AsciiDoc from becoming more widespread?