A programming note for this nascent blog: I’m writing this in asciidoc instead of markdown.

The vast, vast majority of plaintext-to-html blogging solutions take markdown as their plain text format of choice. I use markdown regularly, and enjoy the heck out of it.

But.

The first pain point I came across with markdown was footnotes. Oh man. Footnotes. Something so ubiquitous seems like it would come with a standard way to handle footnotes. Alas and alack, it does not. Some standards have evolved in this area, but which one you adhere to ties you down into a different “flavor” of markdown. I use one of them on Hyperverses, and it works fine.

I saw asciidoc mentioned somewhere as a replacement for markdown. The context was in a larger book-publishing toolchain. And boy howdy, asciidoc has all the little typographical niceties. Not just footnotes: ALL OF THEM. I mean, seriously, it’s got ^superscript and _subscript. It automatically detects and properly links irc URLs. The source code formatting is off the chain.

I figure tilde.club is as good a space as any to develop some asciidoc muscles.