Org-Mode Is One of the Most Reasonable Markup Languages to Use for Text (2018)
After considering two or three dozens of different "lightweight" markup languages (i.e. not flavors) and designing a few (plus at least three failed attempts to improve Markdown), I'm now almost convinced that Scribble [1] or Perl POD [2] have one of the best possible designs. Not that they are optimal, but they are definitely heading at the correct direction.They are extremely generic: every Scribble syntax is prefixed `@`, every POD construct is either `letter` or `=word`. And yet they are surprisingly unobstructive and readable enough. Compare with BBCode, which is also pretty generic but too annoying.They are readily extensible and need no special one-off syntaxes for most things. Yes, using asterisks or underscores for emphasis is handy, but how about strike-throughs? Underlines? Non-emphasis italics (e.g. species name)? Language tags? Abbreviations? Do they nest? Do they work in any context? Why not adding some harmless options to the existing constructs? Syntax extensibility should be one of the foremost concerns of markup language design and they got it right.Edit: I should stress that these concerns are only valid for writings. For casual comments, less is better (ideally no-follow links and verbatim texts should suffice).[1] https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/[2] https://perldoc.perl.org/perlpod.html