Haskell thriving in the wild!
replyYou should be aware that pandoc markdown has extensive non-standard additions to the language to make it usable.
replyIf you want a pure markup language that is simple, plain text readable and able to produce text more complex than what a type writer could manage in 1920 then restructured text is the way to go.
You may be overestimating technical abilities of 99% of the people. I tried to convert some to pandoc and failed miserably. Personally I love it, markdown is becoming more and more central to my workflows.
replyFor the short, simple documents that most people make, a versioned, wysiwyg word processor is going to beat everything else.
replyI mean, they don't want to think about building the output, never mind controlling the process.
For most of the short simple documents I create, I don't want to redo the formating for every document. Simply writing it in something simple like Markdown ( possibly a markdown wysiwig editor) and having my software automatically apply appropriate standard formats to it is ideal.
replyRight, most people don't want to do that, they want the burden of applying styles to the couple headings or whatever.
replyUnfortunately, most people don't use paragraph styles, but if you do, it's a couple clicks.
Agreed. There is actually a lot better control in openoffice / libreoffice than most people know. You just have to set up your styles and be systematic about (virtually) never using direct formatting, instead always applying a pre-configured style. There is a distinct value in seeing your final product as you work, when the final product is visual.
replyAnd if you define shortcut keys for your styles it's as quick to type as markdown.
replyThis is more of a utopia than expecting the average office drone to learn emacs.
replyI'm a programmer and even I like writing in a non-programmable environment. Programming in the document system just stimulates the more primitive parts of my brain that love the processing and programming more than the writing itself. So it's distracting in that way.
replyBuilding my resume in a wysiwyg editor was an exercise in frustration. Formatting was inconsistent, they were only searchable from inside the editor and versioning was useless because diff had no meaning.
replyMy markdown resume has its own problems but having this level of control has been a huge load off my mind.