Twenty years of Markdown hindsight, in one markup language: Carve

Markdown won because it disappears: you write text, and the markup stays out of your way. But anyone who has used it for real documents knows where it stops disappearing – the moment you need a table with a merged cell, a numbered figure, a citation, or just the string snake_case without a stray italic. Then you are suddenly writing HTML inside your “plain text”. Carve is a lightweight markup language built on a simple premise: keep everything Markdown got right, and fix what twenty years of daily use exposed. Here is what that looks like in practice. If you are interested in some of the history, there is a chronological survey of lightweight markup languages – from AsciiDoc onward – showing where some ideas came from and how it all came together in a single, coherent syntax. The syntax looks like what it does Carve’s inline delimiters are visual mnemonics – each one hints at its own effect: *bold* looks bold. /italic/ slants. _underline_ underlines. ~strike~ strikes through. ^super^…