I understand where the author is coming from and respect their contributions to Commonmark.
But...
There are tons of markup languages for prose that have well-defined specs.
So, why did Markdown win?
IMO, because it does not have a well-defined spec. It is highly tolerant of formatting errors, inconsistencies, etc. If an author makes a mistake when writing Markdown, you can always look at it in plain text.
Whereas a perfectly-spec'd markup language would probably evolve toward an unreadable-to-humans mess in the committee-driven pursuit of precision.
You see this theme in so many places in tech: "less is more", the Unix philosophy of everything-is-a-file, messy HTML5 over "XHTML", ML extraction vs. explicit semantic web, etc.
But...
There are tons of markup languages for prose that have well-defined specs.
So, why did Markdown win?
IMO, because it does not have a well-defined spec. It is highly tolerant of formatting errors, inconsistencies, etc. If an author makes a mistake when writing Markdown, you can always look at it in plain text.
Whereas a perfectly-spec'd markup language would probably evolve toward an unreadable-to-humans mess in the committee-driven pursuit of precision.
You see this theme in so many places in tech: "less is more", the Unix philosophy of everything-is-a-file, messy HTML5 over "XHTML", ML extraction vs. explicit semantic web, etc.