We should have Markdown-rendered websites

I spend a good part of my week writing docs. The docs that come out of Markdown are hard to read, hard to maintain, long, ugly, and limited, requiring postprocessing for simple things like a Table of Contents. Websites need content to be even richer than docs (and no, Mr. Developer, what you want is not the sole requirement of the rest of the people on the planet). If you want to make an entire website out of Markdown, make Markdown suck less.

I think we need a configuration format for websites. Configuration formats are designed for humans first, and fit to purpose. What might that format require? Probably: style, layout, macros, emeddable objects, inheritable/overrideable values, logic, loops, etc. Basically a DSL. You describe independent blocks (layout, style, content, etc) and the browser takes the instructions and renders the result. Not insanely different in concept than HTML/CSS, but everything could use one common format, in a manner more human-friendly than we have now, content would be independent of form/function, and none of it would inherit some unrelated design principles from some antiquated non-human-friendly technology.

  text "Employees table description" |
     This is a description of the employees table.
     The name and e-mail address are listed to the right.
  
  table "Employees"
     @Name ~> Frank
              Suzanne
              Rahul
              Aman
     @E-mail address -> frank@me.com
                        suzanne@me.com
                        rahul@me.com
                        aman@me.com
  
  style "table.Employees"
     @Name
       column
         bgcolor "green"
     @"Email address"  rows  bgcolor "gray"
  
  layout "main-page"
     panel "1"
       align: left
       content "text.Employees table description"
     panel "2"
       align: right-of "layout.main-page.1"
       content "table.Employees"

This is the reason why Markdown isn't a good specification for this. But I do agree with the sentiment.

I mean it _sounds_ good, but how will we cram a million ads down user's throats and measure every twitch of their input devices? It's almost as though the author is suggesting that web site proprietors might be more interested in "serving content" than "driving engagement" which I find disturbing and upsetting.

/s

Make a World Wide Markdown Consortium, release v1 of Markdown based on a randomly picked flavor, let it stagnate for decades, then let Google implement shadowMarkdown in Google Chrome, which renders at 300FPS for them, and unluckily falls back to a JS polyfill that ends up solving a rubik's cube before every character it renders. Once that has gone for long enough, let Google form their own MHATWG and pretend it's open while they keep a majority of the seats, to steer the evolution of WebMarkdown.

Also Safari still doesn't support headings for some reason.

> AsciiDoc is a plain text markup language for writing technical content. It’s packed with semantic elements and equipped with features to modularize and reuse content.

Isn't that the opposite of Markdown?