Comment by jurip
6 years ago
It's weird how both ReST and Markdown stumbled on that indentation thing. And ReST has the awkward header underlines, too. Both of those are annoying at the best of times and basically unusable with proportional fonts (and we're dealing with prose here, where there should be no reason to force people to use monospaced fonts if they don't want to.)
If I'm ever involved in designing a syntax like that, the first hard and fast rule will be that the user should never have to count anything, especially in relation to anything else.
reStructuredText is very committed to the plain text visually matching the formatted. For headings, visual underlining makes sense in that context. And code is conventionally indented, so it also makes a lot of sense. (Blockquotes are indented as well, differing from code blocks by the absence of `::` at the end of the preceding paragraph; indentation again matches conventional appearance. But that’s a place where I get where Markdown’s coming from, using > indentation like in emails.)
In more recent times, convenience of writing has become a more important concern to people, because these formats have shifted from niche use by dedicated people in real text editors that would like what they see to match the end result fairly well, to mainstream use in textareas and similar, and sometimes even WYSIWYG editors. That’s what’s driven people to prefer the convenience of code fencing, because indenting each line in a textarea is a pain. Ditto on headings. If reStructuredText were being redone now, I think it’s fair to say that prefix rather than underlined headers would be at least an option. It would just remain to be seen whether they went with `###` meaning level 3 even if there was no `##` or `#`, or whether they’d boost it up to level 1 or title, as appropriate.