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I'd rather pair markdown with an independent template language, if I need programmability. (Or script tags, though that's only useful in contexts where you'll view it rendered and script tags aren't blocked.)
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AsciiDoc is even older than Markdown.
As is org-mode. I think Markdown is one of those VHS vs Betamax kind of situations where it was just lucky to get the traction that its competitors didn't.
[[https://123.com][Description]]
[Description](https://123.com)There is so much you can't put in Markdown because it doesn't work without rendering.
And of course you can write some pages in this ecosystem in Markdown if you want using MyST [2]
Once I felt that Markdown wasn't enough for documentation and Asciidoc seemed to be a good alternative. I tried to rewrite it to AsciiDoc, but there was some unexpected ugly ess. Iirc e.g. lists. It bothered me so much, I switched back to markdown. Today I reach for Typst when I need more than Markdown. Biggest caviar there is that html export is still wip.
Pandoc seems to support converting from and to Typst. That might be an option for you.
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What exactly is your comment about? Have you heard about asciidoc before?
AsciiDoc is even older than Markdown.
By that name, yes, but much of Markdown was "discovered" rather than invented, having been used in email/newsgroups/... for a long time.
The problem with asciidoc is that it doesn't support nesting. Markdown allows you to nest constructs as much as you want using syntax that are easy to use for both humans and documentation-generating applications. The asciidoc developers don't seem to consider this an important issue: https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor/issues/1121 While asciidoc has some nice constructs, this made it a no go the last time I w…
Unfortunate naming. When most devs think of "ascii" they think "oh that character encoding you shouldn't use anymore"
As much as people don't really like it, reStructuredText with Sphinx is still my favorite one of these. Once you get into wanting to do fancy things, the sheer power and extensibility of it with custom directives and community plugins is hard to beat. The glossary, index, and project cross-referencing features (intersphinx) are amazing. You can easily integrate with Bibtex reference libraries (maybe managed in Zotero…
Other than inertia, what is keeping AsciiDoc from overtaking Markdown? Personally I like the ubiquity and simplicity of Markdown, but I can also see the benefits of the features AsciiDoc has to offer.
ASCII, by way of that character encoding standard, implies that dark age before writing and transmitting 'café' or 'Warschauer Straße' or '€10' or '¡olé!' just worked. Not a great marketing point.
So the first thing you are wondering when you read 'AsciiDoc' is, “Wait, does this mean it doesn't support anything but ASCII characters?”, regardless of whether or not that is true.