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.
> It should be readable, as a complete document, in its existing text form without any transformation.
Is this _needed_, or is this nice to have?
A markup language annotates text and describes _how it should be rendered_. It feels redundant to describe how a document should be rendered (presumable for final consumption) _and_ have the document be readable as-is.
Case in point: I'd argue that HTML is a great markup language. I wouldn't call it the most readable in its current form.
I agree with the spirit here, but it ultimately feels more "nice to have" than truly required.
Very much disagree. Think about Markdown readmes. It's great, and very useful, that when looking through a git repo that I can just look at the readme in a shell or text editor, and also as important, diffs when changing a markdown file are a lot cleaner/easier to understand. Simultaneously, it's also great that I get a nice formatted readme page when I'm browsing a GitHub repo, for example.
As the sibling commenter said, if all you care about is the output why wouldn't you just write it in Word?
Note, however, that the plain text form has for a long time typically I believe been the output of a machine conversion from an XML vocabulary, and now always is. I’m not deep enough in the weeds to know all the whens and the distribution of formats, but RFC 2629 (June 1999) defined the first XML vocabulary, and RFC 7990 (December 2016) completed the process of declaring an XML format the canonical source, rather than plain text. To learn more, start at https://www.rfc-editor.org/rse/format-faq/.
Consequently, new RFCs are now published most obviously as full regular HTML, like https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9110. The plain text form is still available (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9110.txt), but it’s no longer paginated and may be incomplete, as specs may include SVG graphics. (RFC 9110 uses ASCII art in some places, e.g. sections 3.6 and 3.7. I am no connoisseur of recent RFCs, but don’t know of any using SVG yet to give an example. I don’t know what the text form gets in this case.)
Most germane to this discussion now: older RFCs got converted to lightly-marked-up-but-mostly-plain-text HTML via rfc2html, and exceptions and tweaks and whatnot had to be made regularly, because in the past the RFC document format was not designed to be machine-readable, and it showed in irregularities that are not acceptable in a markup language.
So in summary: yes, you can get some inspiration from RFC documents, but don’t mistake that textual format for an acceptable markup language, because it wouldn’t actually work.
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.