IMO this misses the most important thing needed in a great markup language. It should be readable, as a complete document, in its existing text form without any transformation. The ideal syntax would be so good that you would rarely want to transform the document in any way.
I think inspiration in this area should come from an unusual place: RFC documents (like https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6877.txt). These documents are fully readable in their standard text form. The only things missing are conveniences like clickable links, which could be supplied by a viewer application without transforming the text of the document.
Markdown comes the closest to being directly readable, but it makes a number of sacrifices to syntax in view of its intended transformation to HTML. It's also limited in scope, patterned after ASCII email syntax. So you miss document-oriented conveniences like standardized headers, proper citations, and pages - all of which RFC documents have!
That's in part the reason that a bunch of people have come behind and written extensions to Markdown. IMO someone needs to come back and gather the best of these into a consistent and simple syntax that is oriented around the needs of plain text readers.
I think inspiration in this area should come from an unusual place: RFC documents (like https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6877.txt). These documents are fully readable in their standard text form. The only things missing are conveniences like clickable links, which could be supplied by a viewer application without transforming the text of the document.
Markdown comes the closest to being directly readable, but it makes a number of sacrifices to syntax in view of its intended transformation to HTML. It's also limited in scope, patterned after ASCII email syntax. So you miss document-oriented conveniences like standardized headers, proper citations, and pages - all of which RFC documents have!
That's in part the reason that a bunch of people have come behind and written extensions to Markdown. IMO someone needs to come back and gather the best of these into a consistent and simple syntax that is oriented around the needs of plain text readers.