alt Hacker NewsA few things here.
1. Use a proper Markdown parser. The grammar is easy to define EBNF style most implementations I see now days use some recursive descent parser, etc… Regex implementation was used in original authors parser when it became popular.
2. You can resolve ambiguities and define more consistent symbols that make sense. Most markdown implementations are decent and follow common sense best practice syntax.
3. The beauty is its simplicity. You can pick it up in a few minutes and utilize it anywhere you damn near see a text box.
4. Parsing to HTML isn’t the only option! I mostly use TUI markdown viewers that render the document via ANSI escape codes beautifully. Check out glow project. But once you parse and have a AST, you can easily walk it and render it in other ways as well. Again though. Everyone can read a text document and a html document. You can render it to a PDF if need be.
5. Do we really need a whole new markup text2<format of some kind>? Markdown is simple fast and widely supported. So I have to say.. I prefer it over most things and that includes Rst.
If you need real beauty and power you can move to LaTeX or something… My two cents anyway.
I recently tried to create markdown like parser, I had to refer a lot to common marks. What I saw was madness. I never knew from casual use, that markdown is so complex. There is literally zero thought about parsing, it forces natural looking text into a format that can be structured into actual markup, but it has so many pitfalls and edge cases that it just feels wrong. Each time I've looked up another markdown parser I was stunned how overegineered they are. If you need an AST to parse something seemingly simple like markdown, then something went wrong. Probably every coreutil is smaller then the average markdown parser. Why?