Comment by chuckadams
2 days ago
The author of CommonMark and Pandoc has a new format called Djot: https://djot.net/ that I've been meaning to check out. Supposedly more sane to parse, and it comes from someone who would definitely know about that sort of thing.
A little bit of a problem, as a Korean, is that the name “djot” (and also common word “jot”) sounds like a Korean slang for “dick” :/
I like it, but it doesn’t seem to have a specification, making it hard to create a new implementation.
I think this is what you're looking for: https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/jgm/djot/b...
That’s a reference, not a specification. I would expect something like a formal grammar or a description of a parsing algorithm.
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Wow this looks like a stricter, more sane Markdown! Great, will try it... sometimes.
Djot is great. I use it in my project ( client for https://timbran.org/moor.html ). It has all that I needed from markdown without any excess, and it's safe and easy to parse and familiar to people.
Without the excess? From the site:
> Straight double quotes (") and single quotes (') are parsed as curly quotes
I don't know who actually likes curly quotes, they are clearly excess to me. And as parsing sometimes fails (as the site says it may), you get inconsistent results, and failures stick out like a sore thumb.
Here is another syntax: this is <*bold>. Very unlikely to clash, can be vibe coded in an hour. But it's more of the same.
> I don't know who actually likes curly quotes
For reading, I don’t know who prefers straight quotes.
For writing—
There are more than a few people on HN who deliberately type curly quotes and other non-ASCII punctuation, due to a strong preference for them. I’m one of them.
I use Compose sequences: ; ; for left single quote, : : for left double, ' ' for right single, " " for right double.
(Accordingly, I hate being subjected to automatic curlification, partly because it’s not always correct, but more because if I typed ' or " you better believe I meant ' or ".)