It's funny how people are commenting as if reST was created as a competitor to MarkDown: it's actually quite the opposite. reST was a 2002 evolution on StructuredText from even earlier, and MD was first publicized in 2004.
They've got extremely similar goals, and for the most basic text, both read and write like plain text too. And it was obviously a time when this thing simply became a thing everybody desired, so many "formats" appeared.
Why did MD win has — IMO — nothing to do with how it's "simpler" or "more readable" — they are largely interchangeable for anything that's easily represented with whitespaces in pure ASCII.
Or does someone claim that the following is unreadable gibberish that they need a parser for?
The best friends
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``markdown`` and ``reST`` are two formats that *largely* aim to achieve the same goals:
* Be simple to read without any parser
* Be quick and simple to type out
I really, really don't see how the Markdown variant of the above is better in any way (note that I am not saying that reST is better either)? It's mostly the weirdness of history that has one prevail over the other, but both are good enough for their core goals.
You've provided a very simple example that can be performed easily in both Markdown and reST.
reST offers a lot of additional formatting features which are beneficial if you need them and cruft when you don't.
I first started using Github-flavored Markdown after signing up for Github in 2010 (possibly earlier under another alias.) I used reStructuredText for Python docs a couple times. I found the latter to have a much higher learning curve and I haven't had a reason to use it since.
In general, either will be simple as long as your input is simple, and they will become complex as soon as you want something complex — I am pretty sure people here bringing the pitchforks are really not even aware of how reST looks like in the first place.
But looking through examples at https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/user/rst/quickref.html#..., I really see a lot of non-simple stuff done in an obvious way too (block quotes, tables, bullet and enumerated lists, sections and headings, separator lines...).
By the time you got on the markdown train, it has already won out, and you've probably seen a lot more of it than of reST, even if MD still wasn't standardized. As a counter-point, having done lots of reST with Python docutils prior to 2010, I still mix up reST and MD — there's nothing intuitive about any of their special syntax, and our perception is mostly tainted with our prior experience. I've also written a lot of ASCII-only docs prior to either of those, and most people used ever-so-slightly different conventions there as well (somebody mentioned using /this/ for italics as well).
reST was standardized in the form of a Python PEP from its inception so you could at least rely on learning it once.
Edit: My ultimate point is that you (and most everybody else, including me) are using MD because it's more popular, not because it's "better".
I'm not arguing one is better, just that Markdown is simpler: it literally has less syntax. If I don't need all the bells and whistles of reST, Markdown is simpler to learn, use and likely implement.
I agree that reST is probably a better fit for complex use cases like building a docs site. But it's overkill for Facebook Messenger or even forum posts, IMO.
If you want to use a mark-up language in a chat app, a subset of either would serve you just fine and both are equally simple. It sounds like you are comparing a subset of what-is-markdown-today (and there are still variants) to full reST, which I don't think is a fair comparison.
From a very brief look, here's some things that probably aren't generally necessary (and aren't included in Markdown): Document structure, Bibliographic fields, complex footnotes and citations, directives, substitution definitions
All of these increase the number of things I have to escape, as well as my cognitive load when writing documents. And that's before we talk about reST config settings!
You could use a subset of reST, or you could just use Markdown!
> Or does someone claim that the following is unreadable gibberish that they need a parser for?
Unreadable? No. Frustrating to type out? Yes. Underline style is annoying when editing, and even if you technically don't have to match the length you will still feel obliged do. Double backtick is just awful to write, annoying out of all proportion to how much extra time it actually takes.
I do yes. I swear at some point there was markdown or some variant that allowed one single-character thing for italics and another for bold (maybe * for bold and / for italic? And _ for underline?). These days I've mostly just given up using bold.
You are right, there was a convention using that as well: I still have it in my muscle memory too (I always expect bold with a single asterisk). But I can't remember when and what that was.
I still wouldn't go as far to say the MD or RST syntax is hard in any way (and really, asterisk which requires a Shift key is worse than double backticks).
They've got extremely similar goals, and for the most basic text, both read and write like plain text too. And it was obviously a time when this thing simply became a thing everybody desired, so many "formats" appeared.
Why did MD win has — IMO — nothing to do with how it's "simpler" or "more readable" — they are largely interchangeable for anything that's easily represented with whitespaces in pure ASCII.
Or does someone claim that the following is unreadable gibberish that they need a parser for?
I really, really don't see how the Markdown variant of the above is better in any way (note that I am not saying that reST is better either)? It's mostly the weirdness of history that has one prevail over the other, but both are good enough for their core goals.