Hi everyone,
Since day one I met AsciiDoc, I am in love with it.
I suggest a full markup and a short markup for many (if not all) of the elements, it is kind of like the Java 1.4 syntax, and many syntax sugar added in later versions.
The benefit is that the concepts are very easy, just block element and inline element with different styles, and could support complex structures that are hard to support, like the last paragraph belongs to the parent section instead of the last child section.
== Examples
Actually AsciiDoc (AsciiDoctor) is already like this now. Here are some examples:
=== Blocks:
vs
=== Inline Macros and Inline Elements:
"xref:document-b.adoc#section-b[Section B]" vs "<<document-b.adoc#section-b, Section B>>"
== New Thoughts
I think we could formalize the idea to make it consistent all the way, like a block element can always be written as an open block, and an inline element can always be written as an inline macro.
The full markup could express everything clearly and comprehensively, while the short markup is easy to write but could have some limitations. In extreme cases, everything could like that:
[document,type="book",title="Full Markup Example"]
--
[preamble]
--
This is the preamble paragraph.
--
[section,level=2,title="Section 1"]
--
[sidebar]
--
This is bold:bold and italic:italic[] text[].
[paragraph]
--
Another paragraph shows up here.
--
-- // sidebar
-- // section
-- // document
And the one with the short markup:
= Full Markup Example
:doctype: book
This is the preamble paragraph.
== Section 1
[sidebar]
--
This is *bold and _italic_ text*.
Another paragraph shows up here.
--
So we could have a very verbose document and a very concise document that are exactly the same semantically, and both are rendered exactly the same.
Does this make sense?
