StrictMark: Markdown, Refactored

did I miss link or is there a parsing script yet?

I very rarely see this style -- which comes from "Setext", IIRC, which might be patient zero of the "human readable plain text markup styles" -- in the wild anymore, and I suspect it's probably for the reasons you're describing here. I almost never use it myself, except in contexts where the "source file" is just as likely to be read as a rendered HTML version. README files are a good example.

> In some editors/IDE, the underline even gets highlighted / boldfaced, thereby exacerbating this effect.

I think a lot of editors just don't know about this style of heading, but they do know that a line of three or more dashes is used to create a horizontal rule, so they're trying to highlight that.

Markdown was engineered to be flexible _on purpose_ because it was designed for writers and readers, not programmers.

Writers are less likely to care about what symbol means "bulleted list item", as long as anything that makes sense for it, just works.

It's a mistake to think of Markdown as a programming language, or a "formal grammar".

That being said, if it works for you go for it...

From the spec:

> No double symbols, i.e. strong not *strong*.

I understand the rationale. But, this is immediately no longer Markdown. "It's 'Markdown, Refactored!'" If "refactored" means "incompatible," sure? I guess? But still: incompatible.

"So what?" Good question, imaginary interlocutor. Here's so what: one of Markdown's defining features, love or it hate it, is that it deliberately doesn't make you choose between emphasizing with * characters or emphasizing with _ characters, other than being consistent with the start and end. Use a single * or _ character, get emphasis/italics; use double, get strong/bold; you don't get underlines because you don't use those in typography.

The same is true for lists: only "-" is acceptable, not "+" or "". Fine, but there are a lot of Markdown documents that are out there that use "" as the list character, and I am sure there is at least one weirdo inexplicably using "+".

So StrictMark breaks every Markdown document that uses boldface, and probably about half the Markdown documents that use italics. (I don't know about other Markdown users, but over the years I have not been consistent with how I markup italics, for a variety of reasons.) And, it probably breaks about half the unordered lists in the wild, too.

I understand that this is being done for well-intentioned and noble reasons, but: it ain't Markdown. It's a new, incompatible plaintext markup system. This creates a bit of an uncomfortable point: if I'm going to have to redo all my documents (or just do things The New Way going forward), then why not switch to AsciiDoc or Textile?

What problem were you hoping to solve with this?