I’m delighted to see this project evolving and look forward to following its development! I’ve used just about every markup technology over my (many) years as a tech writer, from troff macros, to SGML/DocBook and then XML/DITA, and finally, to Markup with the Material for MkDocs project, as a sponsor. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, but for enabling contributors outside the tech writing community, simpler source formats are the way.
That said, if pressed, I’d recommend AsciiDoc[0] over any Markup flavor for a greenfield project _today_. We had to either add or bake plugins or extensions to get features that are already included in AsciiDoc, making our Markup implementation both more complex and wholly unique. That wasn’t a huge problem, because we didn’t have a large pool of contributors to educate and support, but it would have been much easier just to point to a standard.
But, hey! The roadmap includes modules, to make way for other source formats! This is the way. :-)
> That said, if pressed, I’d recommend AsciiDoc over any Markup flavor for a greenfield project _today_.
Likewise for me as well, and I am a massive Material for MkDocs fan. Markdown is certainly simple to use and gets the job done, but AsciiDoc just provides so much out of the box without hurting my eyes like reStructuredText (used by Sphinx) does. It also helps that's there's effectively one type of AsciiDoc I'm aware of, whereas there's a number of Markdown flavors atop CommonMark to be cognizant of. I will concede, however, it's learning curve is not as simple as MarkDown's...
A powerful framework for working with AsciiDoc for documentation purposes is Antora[0]. The Red Hat ecosystem (Fedora and CentOS projects) uses it for their public facing docs. That being said, it is a beast to understand if starting from scratch rather than contributing to project's existing docs. It designed to be able to consolidate large projects with multiple component repositories and versions per component into a single docs site. Typical balance of more capabilities, more up-front cost of adoption.
The AsciiDoc WG also maintains an Awesome AsciiDoc[1] page of projects within the ecosystem.
Laudable, but I don't think TapirMD will gain much traction.
First, your landing page doesn't describe how TapirMD fits into the Markdown universe. I just see a list of features. Why should I read the list? Ah, the spec page[0] has some info, but it should really be on the landing page.
Second, and more importantly, TapirMD is not a superset of CommonMark[1]. GitHub had its own flavor of MD, but it's been some years now since they migrated to a CommonMark base plus extensions[2].
I recommend looking more closely at the CommonMark universe and innovating there.
Thank you very much for your feedback. I truly appreciate it.
TapirMD is not a superset of Markdown or CommonMark.
It simply inherits some of its DNA from Markdown.
While Markdown is very simple, it is also highly underspecified and syntactic inconsistent.
CommonMark improves on it slightly, but not fundamentally.
Moreover, basic Markdown lacks many essential features that web content writers need.
Yes, none of these factors prevent it from being adopted widely.
But for me, the limited feature set is the real blocker.
I don’t want to rely on a patchwork of extensions and third-party tools.
TapirMD (where MD stands for `markup doc`) aims to address these shortcomings.
It is a new language, deliberately not compatible with Markdown,
and never intended to fit within the Markdown ecosystem.
Its official toolchain is designed to empower web content writers to create rich,
feature-complete articles without relying on any third-party tools.
The spec is too long to serve as a landing page.
Maybe a concise demo showcasing sample code on the leading page would be great.
Thank you again for the constructive criticism.
TapirMD was primarily developed for my own needs as a technical writer,
to produce content for my websites (see the .tmd soruce of my articles: https://tmd.tapirgames.com/use-cases.html).
Markdown simply felt too limiting. I've been using TapirMD for over a year now and am quite satisfied with it.
I'd be delighted if it proves helpful to other writers as well.
That said, if pressed, I’d recommend AsciiDoc[0] over any Markup flavor for a greenfield project _today_. We had to either add or bake plugins or extensions to get features that are already included in AsciiDoc, making our Markup implementation both more complex and wholly unique. That wasn’t a huge problem, because we didn’t have a large pool of contributors to educate and support, but it would have been much easier just to point to a standard.
But, hey! The roadmap includes modules, to make way for other source formats! This is the way. :-)
[0] https://asciidoc.org/
EDIT: s/That's the way/This is the way. :-)/