Writing my own markup language

The article you are currently reading has been written in a markup language of my own design, called JAMES. It’s a line-based language that borrows ideas from Gemtext (itself inspired partly from Gophermaps and Troff though it’s not a programming language like Troff is but a markup language. The rest of this article discusses my motivations for a new markup language and provides a tour of JAMES syntax. You can read the source code of this page and the JAMES program online. Why another markup language? There are already so many markup languages—from the featureful (LaTeX) to the lightweight (Markdown, Gemtext); from the procedural (roff) to the declarative (HTML). Before I began writing JAMES, I made great use of gemtext; in fact I think it’s nearly perfect for my needs. However, the operative word is nearly. Gemtext is not quite flexible enough to be an everyday markup language due to a few lacking features: The spec explicitly requires line-wise parsing. I’ve written parsers that…