AsciiDoc is a plain text markup language for writing technical content. It’s packed with semantic elements and equipped with features to modularize and reuse content. AsciiDoc content can be composed using a text editor, managed in a version control system, and published to multiple output formats.
It’s a plain text format for writing structured documents, based on formatting conventions from email and usenet.
Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber created Markdown in 2004 as an easy-to-read pmarkup language.[9] Markdown is widely used for blogging and instant messaging, and also used elsewhere in online forums, collaborative software, documentation pages, and readme files.
Markless is a new markup standard that focuses on being intuitive and fast to parse. Being a purely text-based markup, no complicated editor software is required to create documents in it. With its focus on intuition and consistency it should also be a good fit as a markup choice for text based platforms such as chat, forums, etc. Markless does not specify its results based on another document format, meaning that an implementation could be written to turn a Markless document into practically any other format. Markless is strict and does not allow for any ambiguities in its markup. This both makes it less confusing for the user, and easier to parse for a program. Being based on a specification rather than a reference implementation, Markless also offers the users a much more stable and reliant source to turn to in case of questions about the behaviour of an implementation.
A GNU Emacs major mode for keeping notes, authoring documents, computational notebooks, literate programming, maintaining to-do lists, planning projects, and more — in a fast and effective plain text system.