> Markdown as specified lets you break out HTML whenever you want
I know, but breaking into raw html isn’t as useful as you’d hope. You need a lot of html just to make an image with a caption. And all that ugly html needs to be copy pasted each time it’s needed, since there’s no way to reuse it.
And there’s lots of problems you can’t really solve like that at all. For example, I want latex style automatic numbering of figures (Figure 8: Xxx) and I want to link to that figure elsewhere in the document (“for detail, see Figure 8”). I want the numbers to be automatically generated based on document order. I also want numbered sections / headings. You can sort of do with css. But you can’t automatically label the links to those sections. Markdown also doesn’t support comments. You can use html comments but then my internal notes / removed sections end up in the generated html!
Even trying to do some of this stuff makes your document become - as you said - a thicket of angle brackets. I want to retain the readability of my document along the way. Even with a tool like pug, do I have to type a P before each paragraph? Gross. I just want to write my paragraphs with line breaks, like markdown. I don’t want it peppered with stuff like that. And I don’t want forced indentation on my prose.
p This is not a natural
p way to write a series of paragraphs of text
I know, but breaking into raw html isn’t as useful as you’d hope. You need a lot of html just to make an image with a caption. And all that ugly html needs to be copy pasted each time it’s needed, since there’s no way to reuse it.
And there’s lots of problems you can’t really solve like that at all. For example, I want latex style automatic numbering of figures (Figure 8: Xxx) and I want to link to that figure elsewhere in the document (“for detail, see Figure 8”). I want the numbers to be automatically generated based on document order. I also want numbered sections / headings. You can sort of do with css. But you can’t automatically label the links to those sections. Markdown also doesn’t support comments. You can use html comments but then my internal notes / removed sections end up in the generated html!
Even trying to do some of this stuff makes your document become - as you said - a thicket of angle brackets. I want to retain the readability of my document along the way. Even with a tool like pug, do I have to type a P before each paragraph? Gross. I just want to write my paragraphs with line breaks, like markdown. I don’t want it peppered with stuff like that. And I don’t want forced indentation on my prose.