

Quaint – a markup language loosely inspired by Markdown - adulau
http://breuleux.net/quaint/

======
ricardobeat
One of the good things about markdown, and one of it's goals I guess, is that
it looks like perfectly formatted, readable plaintext.

The shortcuts in quaint, with markers only at the beginning of words, logical
operators etc, look very practical for typing, but make it more oriented
towards technical writers or developers, and less suited for things like
comments and similar general-purpose text inputs. It's somewhere in between
Markdown and a template engine.

~~~
breuleux
Yeah, I won't dispute that Markdown's emphasis syntax is a bit more layman-
friendly than Quaint's (though there might be a way to hack it in anyway). One
important goal with Quaint is syntactic consistency, though, which means some
tradeoffs have to be made. I think it could be a nice _option_ for comments or
other generic input, though. Some implementations of Markdown can get a bit
frustrating when you're trying to do some unusual things like nesting emphasis
(though, to be fair, it's often only an implementation problem... I just wish
they'd fix it).

------
jffry
Hrm, kind of cool, I guess. It's less useful to me because I don't really
write much in the way of Python.

Markdown has many intercompatible implementations in multiple languages; with
the ability to put arbitrary Python code into a Quaint template, that gets
harder.

Are you thinking about how to go beyond a _.py.q_ to other languages? (e.g.
_.js.q_ )

~~~
breuleux
I am the author. Plain .q is supposed to be language agnostic (and I'd say
it's relatively featureful), whereas .py.q, .js.q, etc. would be used if you
wanted to embed some other language (though there's only a Python
implementation for the time being). That's the logic behind the naming scheme,
anyway :)

------
MaxGabriel
I really like this project. For alot of writing, say a README, Markdown is
probably preferable. But I've been taking notes for a Coursera course using
IPython notebook. It's been good, but I've felt the limitations of markdown
(no easy sub/superscript is a big one for math). Quaint looks like it would
make that very easy, and my personal notes are not a domain where I'm
concerned with using a new format.

------
buro9
For me, Markdown's issues relate to it's original purpose (which encapsulated
use in emails) and it's use today (as a general long-form markup language).

I've found repeatedly that users dislike Markdown for the things that are hard
to express in plain text (images, tables, links to some degree) and for
surprising side effects of the syntax (in a hashtag age, headers appear too
often and reduce readability, and the user misunderstands why).

What I would like to see is that Markdown is simplified further, and that some
effort is made to find a better solution to links, images, etc.

------
ak217
To me this is solving all the wrong problems. I want to see a Markdown
_standard_ with the extensions like Markdown tables admitted (Markdown tables
are _really important_ for making Markdown usable), and a LaTeX extension for
math (perhaps [this]([https://github.com/justinvh/Markdown-
LaTeX](https://github.com/justinvh/Markdown-LaTeX)) is a good starting point).

By comparison, this project does not define a standard.

------
nukerhazz
A small suggestion: add a proper <title> to the home page.

