I like markdown, and can see the lure of additions such as this one, but I also sometimes wonder whether we gained much compared to troff and its companion programs (pic, eqn, tbl, chem, etc. See https://www.troff.org/prog.html).
If we added Unicode support and html and pdf output to those, I think the main thing we would miss is readability of the raw text. That doesn’t look like much progress in half a century.
> That doesn’t look like much progress in half a century.
Considering the author of groff became the SGML expert, with SGML supporting custom syntax parsing ranging from troff-like line commands all the way to markdown or Wikimedia syntax or subsets thereof precisely for unifying ad-hoc syntax, and SGML the basis for the HTML vocabulary from which these want to run away, I'd rather say tech is re-invented in generational circles. Or devs simply like to grow mini languages ;)
If we added Unicode support and html and pdf output to those, I think the main thing we would miss is readability of the raw text. That doesn’t look like much progress in half a century.