Djot and Markdown interoperability ?

[simonmichael]

Thinking about djot becoming a practical reality for myself and in the tools we all use (Obsidian.. Github..), and how long it might take... I wondered how well djot users could function while using those existing markdown tools, and how well those tools could cope with djot. I tried a djot readme in Obsidian and it looked fine except for also showing all the {#blockids} in the rendered output. What's your experience ?

New standards that gracefully interoperate with the old tend to do very well with adoption. See eg Typescript. djot is not a strict subset of markdown, and maybe can't be. But is there more of an interoperability story possible ? Eg,

• Is it worth documenting a subset of djot ("djot lite") that can be used safely in markdown tools until they support full djot ?

• What minimal support or optional modes could markdown tools add to become reasonably usable for djot ? (Such as, ignoring curly-braced text that looks like djot inline/block attributes ?)

[waldyrious]

Is it worth documenting a subset of djot ("djot lite") that can be used safely in markdown tools until they support full djot ?

This seems interesting. In practice it would be a subset of both djot and markdown, i.e. an intersection (one could also think of it as e.g. "sane markdown" 😄). I'd be curious to see that as well.

Such as, ignoring curly-braced text that looks like djot inline/block attributes?

Just for the fun of it, I wonder if a backwards-compatible Djot would be possible by using the HTML comment syntax for the metadata/attribute bits, e.g. <!--{#blockid}-->/<!--{key="value"}--> instead of {#blockid}/{key="value"}.

[bdarcus]

Almost all of the basic markdown I use in, say, GitHub, is also already djot.

But I think the point of the new language is to avoid the sort of compromises and inconsistencies of markdown.

From that POV, the HTML comment syntax seems to me a compromise I wouldn't want to accept myself.

[waldyrious]

Well, I suppose the mere fact that *foo* is interpreted as italics in markdown and as bold in djot is already a deal-breaker for such an attempt anyway. It still was a fun thought to entertain :)

[bdarcus]

Yeah, I forgot about that one!

[Conaclos]

I wrote a minimal guide for writing djot and commonmark compatible code.

The only incompatibility is the table heading line: Markdown formatters, such as prettier, add spaces between - and |.
See #217 for more details.