> What it can't do (as far as I understand): complex layouts, precise typography, embedded binary content, anything that needs pixel-perfect rendering. Am I missing anything? What are the other limitations I should know about?

Multi-level lists, annoyingly, get rendered as code at the deeper levels because of the 4+ spaces from the beginning of the line.

This is a serious and major drawback of markdown, making it good for developers only. The average person does not want to render code.

Remove that one drawback, and it'll get even better adoption.

▲ chrismorgan 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Multi-level lists, annoyingly, get rendered as code at the deeper levels because of the 4+ spaces from the beginning of the line.

Not so. You just need to be principled with your indentation, adding four spaces or one tab for every level of nesting.

  1. Here is a thing.

      - See, it works.

          Nothing is amiss.

  2.  If you want to align everything…

      -   Then it looks like this.

          Then it doesn’t seem so weird.

(You can leave or remove the two spaces of HN code formatting; zero to three spaces don’t matter.)

▲

xigoi 20 hours ago | parent [-]

I’m pretty sure many Markdown implementations would turn this into a code block. Unfortunately Babelmark seems to currently be broken so I can’t test it.

	▲	chrismorgan 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The original spec says it should work, and it does with <https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/dingus>, as with <https://spec.commonmark.org/dingus/>.

▲ arccy 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

your markdown parser isn't compliant with commonmark: https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#example-294

indented code blocks are leaf blocks, while lists are containers that take precedence

▲ 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

▲ kstrauser a day ago | parent | prev [-]

That's a "feature" of a specific renderer. I just went 22 levels deep with Zed and Marked, and both kept rendering each line as regular text.

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lelanthran a day ago | parent [-]

>> The average person does not want to render code.

> I just went 22 levels deep with Zed and Marked

Sounds like you're agreeing with me :-/

Or are you arguing that the average person is a programmer, using programming editors and JS libraries?

▲

kstrauser a day ago | parent [-]

I don’t follow. Marked definitely isn’t a programming tool. There’s nothing about Markdown that says nested lists should look like code. That’s just an accident of whatever editor you might be using, not of others.

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xigoi 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> That’s just an accident of whatever editor you might be using, not of others.

And that’s the main issue with Markdown.

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lelanthran a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> There’s nothing about Markdown that says nested lists should look like code.

Yes there is. The Common Mark spec, from 2014, says 4+ spaces indents are code. Nested lists go beyond 4+ indents pretty fast.

	▲	kstrauser 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		…as long as you ignore the context that it’s a nested listed under a less-nested list. Also, note that CommonMark is not identical to Markdown. It intends to be a standard definition of the language, but may differ from the original definition and implementation.