I'm iffy on this kind of thing. Markdown has the advantage of looking roughly like what you'd do in plain text and is completely readable in plain text with no processing. It also has the advantage of being nearly standard; it is used on thousands of sites, including some very large ones (e.g. reddit, github, etc.). If I wanted my users to memorize HTML tags I would have just gone with HTML.<p>This seems to have the negatives of both Markdown <i>and</i> HTML, and no unique advantages over either. It's a little less verbose than HTML, but you have to know HTML tags (and Sundown syntax) to use it, and I have my doubts it can avoid the quirks Markdown has because converting any "friendly" markup to a formal syntax like HTML is always prone to quirks. It has the alleged advantage over Markdown of being able to use HTML and Sundown together...but, some Markdown processors also allow mixing MD and HTML, so this is not a unique benefit (this is quirky in Markdown, but I suspect it's quirky in Sundown, too).<p>Maybe I'm missing the benefit here, but it seems like a technical solution to a people problem, and that almost never works.<p>Also, as an aside, it's got the same name as a Markdown processor that is even mentioned in the article! That seems bound to cause confusion, given the similarities in purpose.
First off, Good work on your project, Sed!<p>Here are some clickables of SunSed:<p>- <a href="https://www.sunsed.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.sunsed.com/</a><p>- <a href="https://www.sunsed.com/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://www.sunsed.com/pricing</a><p>- <a href="https://www.sunsed.com/tags/s" rel="nofollow">https://www.sunsed.com/tags/s</a> A list of builtin tags for Sundown<p>I am fine with a new markup if it's quick and to the point. I believe that we need to give the markdown/reStructuredText things a fresh look. At the very least, we may come up with ideas to improve existing languages.<p>Are you planning on opening the source to Sundown? What's the current implementation running in? (golang, python, c, etc?)<p>Some of the other commenters are mentioning markdown being fast. This is probably true. Since there are processors for markdown in C. Actually, when I first glanced the title, I thought it was <a href="https://github.com/vmg/sundown" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/vmg/sundown</a>.<p>In any event, that's just a naming issue. The bigger point is, I think the overall project at SunSed looks pretty cool. Simple markup turns into a nice website. Congratulations on having the website up!
Markdown is being critized because it doesn't allow markdown syntax within HTML blocks, and because the HTML vocabulary recognized isn't customizable. Both problems were basically solved by SGML over 30 years ago.<p>In SGML, you can define arbitrary tokens (character sequences) that the parser replaces into something else, typically into start-element or end-element tags. Replacement text rules are defined in a context-sensitive way depending on the parent element wherein token(s) to replace appear as child content. For example, an asterisk could be mapped to <i>, and within an <i> element could be mapped to </i>, terminating it, and thereby implementing a small fragment of markdown.<p>This, together with tag omission/inference rules on a fully custom DTD vocabulary powerful to cover HTML5, gives you quite a formidable technique for markdown customization, based on an ISO standard.
Very poor naming choice. Sundown is the name of a popular Markdown implementation:<p><a href="https://github.com/vmg/sundown" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/vmg/sundown</a><p>Strongly suggest renaming your project as early as possible.
Here’s the author’s intent with their system:<p>> ... create a platform that makes it super easy for developers to create awesome websites without forcing them to learn new stuff (language, syntax, platform, framework and more)<p>And yet:<p>> I explain what was wrong with Markdown and why I finally had to create my own Markdown alternative<p>I do not think a new, custom HTML template language solves the original goal.
I think there's lots of opportunity for a markdown alternative, but I worry that this starts in the wrong place. It seems like it's built around code, whereas Markdown is built around writing.<p>A friend of mine who works at a newspaper noted that it was really hard to get a lot of people in the mindset of Markdown, because it requires users to think about their writing in terms of HTML, which is harder than it sounds for some. This seems like it pushes things further in a direction where people who aren't code-savvy can't get on board.<p>The other thing to keep in mind: The reason why Markdown is great is because it's readable even without being rendered. This is not, because it simplifies the HTML without abstracting it. That's a tough hurdle to get past for a lot of folks.
Great solution. Given the problem statements that lead to this, i was pleasantly surprised by the elegance of the syntax.<p>There are the obvious arguments about plain-text readability and additional standards, I would suggest thinking about this not as a Markdown replacement but rather a different use-case entirely. I understand the author framed it as a replacement. While that may have been the impetus to the project, i think the result is something entirely it's own.<p>Markdown has a place when a document stands to be published/shared in multiple formats. I use it regularly for blog posts that i also email to others for feedback in plaintext. Sundown looks to me like a light-weight, text-focused haml. Usable when something is intended to only be published in HTML, but where you want to be freed from that markup.
The post just seems like a verbose post hoc justification for wanting to reinvent something. Which is fine, a lot of good learning comes out these toy domain languages. I just don't see any technical benefits or conceptual leaps here other than to say "I built this".<p>It's like back in the day when someone would proclaim smarty to be a disaster and then release their template system that was conceptually exactly the same baring some syntactic sugar
<a href="https://www.sunsed.com/policies/until-the-end" rel="nofollow">https://www.sunsed.com/policies/until-the-end</a><p>> Our promise to you ul.[sic] We are dedicated to supporting our products forever (or until the last customer turns off the lights). ul.[sic] If we create a new version of SunSed that breaks backward compatibility we will support the older version forever. p.[sic]
Started reading with interest, but then everything started to look really similar to HAML [0] after a bit. With the exception that HAML also lets you add CSS classes to your tags...<p>[0] - <a href="http://haml.info/" rel="nofollow">http://haml.info/</a>
As a product marketer, I have to say that the name is very unfortunate.<p>1. Sundown is the name of a Markdown library written in C: <a href="https://github.com/vmg/sundown" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/vmg/sundown</a>. <i>That</i> Sundown is pretty widely known and used among Markdown implementers. As such, when/if the OP's project takes off, it is going to be confusing (for awhile).<p>2. Also, the name itself doesn't strongly suggest that it's an alternative to Markdown. Do recall that Markdown's etymology comes from "(HTML) markup". For the Markdown-implemented-in-C Sundown, the name worked because it evoked its relationship with Markdown. In this case, that's not what the project is about. If the intention was to evoke Markdown, then they should have kept the "Mark" part of it, not the "down" part of it.
This looks very promising. While I do not see this as a replacement for Markdown this has some potential for use cases where Markdown is less suitable, like messaging.<p>The explicit use of the colon makes things a bit saner for users - we’ve all written some ‘unexpected’ markdown before; between the many different flavors (especially line breaking behavior), numerous symbols, and numerous ways to do the same thing (like underlining, bullet points and images). I can see this being a big relief for end-users for certain use-cases.<p>I’d love to try it out if I could see some source code (or a live demo I don’t have to sign up for). Do you plan on setting up a specification?
> I feel like Jeff Atwood and his friends abandoned the Commonmark project that tried to create a universal specification of Markdown. Even if they did, I don't think that Github, Stackoverflow, Reddit and other major Markdown users would ever convert.<p>The CommonMark project has not been abandoned; the CommonMark C parser was implemented on GitHub earlier this year and is used to render Markdown across all repositories: <a href="https://githubengineering.com/a-formal-spec-for-github-markdown/" rel="nofollow">https://githubengineering.com/a-formal-spec-for-github-markd...</a>
I really like it. I was just thinking of writing a markdown to custom HTML parser for my own needs and found markdown syntax to be lacking to express my HTML tags.
I can choose SunDown format for it.<p>Do you have a parser that converts SunDown to HTML already?
I can build it as my first project in Rust while attempting to learn it.
I don’t think this feels like it’s solving any problems that Markdown isn’t already solving. If I’m reading it right, I have to do all <i>this</i> just for some italics?<p>: There is some <i>italic</i> text in this line.<p>This is seven more characters than the equivalent Markdown! And two more than the equivalent HTML. And includes at <i>least</i> five characters that are a bitch to type on most screen keyboards.
This is fine, but isn’t really an alternative to markdown. It’s not good for what markdown is good for, which is writing and reading plain text that can also be transformed to HTML.<p>It looks like it’s an alternate syntax for HTML angle-bracket tags. (Personally, I see no value in that. I can see it’s arguably “cleaner”-looking, but not by much and at the substantial cost of a non-standard syntax.)
I'm not sure the world needs a new markup syntax, especially an awkward mix of HTML and Markdown. But I could be missing the point, since I just base this on my own needs.<p>But thing is, talking about performance and scale goes exactly against your project's credibility. These are pretty much the two dumbest criterias when it comes to markup syntaxes.
FYI: I've started work on an alternative to markdown called texti (text with instructions). It's really more of an evolution e.g. some deletions, some additions, some changes. See some examples at the project site - <a href="https://texti.github.io" rel="nofollow">https://texti.github.io</a>
I really like this. Might use this for my blog as HTML disrupted the flow of typing and yet I couldn't find a satisfactory way to do it with Markdown.
Just because <i>someone</i> is going to link it, I might as well do it first: <a href="https://xkcd.com/927/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/927/</a><p>But yeah, "Too many implementations of Markdown" is not an issue a new markup language is going to solve.<p>"Markdown is slow!" is nonsensical: its implementations are slow (it seems the author tested this, but the link supposed to supply evidence doesn't -- I find it hard to believe that aren't fast implementations of Markdown, but <i>perhaps</i>). Nothing in the language makes it inherently slow.
The HTML part of this spec is strange. Most of the practical point of markdown has been to allow a limited set of user-controlled formatting without requiring an HTML parser in the browser. Furthermore, HTML has non-significant whitespace whereas markdown does, so mixing the two will give weird results.
I like sundown a lot and see how it is better then markdown. It is very bold and smart reimagining of plain text enriched by tags.<p>It has a long road ahead, most likely will fizzle but that doesn't mean we can't use it.
This doesn't seem to solve any issues that markdown has and also fails to see how fast most modern Markdown implementations are. Using an unmaintaned 5 year old perl script for benchmarking is ignorant.
I remember when I moved off Wordpress to Jekyll, all my Wordpress stuff was in Textile using a Textile plugin. When I migrated off, I used a plugin that ran everything through the HTML rendered and exported it.<p>My new stuff is in Kramdown, and my old stuff is HTML with some Jekyll headers at the top. I did have to go back through some of it and clean it up too.<p>If I move to something new, I'd just render everything I have with Kramdown into HTML and move on to the next thing.<p>That's sadly how we have to deal with these engines.
Seems similar to jade?<p>Edit expanding:<p>I liked jade but stopped using because of jsx, and disliking having to research solutions during unique use cases. I also have learned markdown fairly quickly, and like it more now, but I personally don’t think it is as good of an experience reading plain text files as my own “plain text hacks” that I would use to format docs destined to be read in plain text. I feel that it clutters a nicely organized personal note, which adds to mental overhead.
Does anyone think that there should be an alternative to markdown with a more natural syntax, that is text first? Something that is meant to be viewed in plain text most of the time, looks good in text, and easy to type in text, and has nice syntax highlighting.<p>Markdown isn't very aesthetically pleasing in plain text IMO. It's awkward to type, and it doesn't handle indenting the way people would normally create lists and indents in text. (## H2, ### H3 .. really??)
I thought this is the famous Markdown parser by Vicent Martí. [1] It was the most popular Markdown implementation before CommonMark, and is used by GitHub (via RedCarpet, its Ruby binding) before they switch to CommonMark a while ago. The name choice is a bit unfortunate, but I guess it’s too late to change it now.<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/vmg/sundown" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/vmg/sundown</a>
this defies what I want from a markup in plain text. It should look readable and formatted, even when not rendered.<p>Example: <a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gbraad/resume/master/resume.md" rel="nofollow">https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gbraad/resume/master/resum...</a> => <a href="http://gbraad.nl/resume/resume.html" rel="nofollow">http://gbraad.nl/resume/resume.html</a><p>I stopped reading after the first introduction of 'the syntax', as the intro either does not mention the why, or it totally misses the point.
A collection of Sundown documents could be called a Sundown Town <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town</a>
clicking thru on the signup link:
<a href="https://www.sunsed.com/sign-up" rel="nofollow">https://www.sunsed.com/sign-up</a><p>Page not found.
The requested URL /sign-up was not found on this server.
It feels like every other week there's a new alternative to Markdown..<p>Question is, do we need another alternative to the Markdown alternatives we already have?
Goodspeed and may this ulterior specification become famous and used ; buuut i can't avoid thinking about a certain Xkcd strip [0]<p>[0](<a href="https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png" rel="nofollow">https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png</a>)