Comment by tannhaeuser

While indeed neither markdown, much less JSON syntax has been intended as an SGML app, that doesn't stop SGML from parsing JSON, markdown, and other custom Wiki syntax using SHORTREF [1] ;) In fact, the original markdown language is specified as a mapping to HTML angle-bracket markup (with HTML also an SGML vocabulary), and thus it's quite natural to express that mapping using SGML SHORTREF, even though only a subset can be expressed.

[1]: https://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol17/html/Walsh01/Bali...

[2]: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/