While I do like simple markup, I think that all markup languages will become a lot better when text input hardware slightly evolves. We are so close to having this.
We have Unicode but most of its symbols are a pain to generate on conventional keyboards.
We have touch-screens but desktop computer keyboards don’t offer them and software on phones/pads still tries a bit too hard to emulate a conventional keyboard layout.
Imagine if all standard keyboards had touch displays on the side to quickly flip between tables of related symbols, optionally with some context-sensitive mode? Then, instead of having to use creative ASCII tricks to make it “simple” to describe what you want, you just do it through your input device.
Ultimately I think markup languages will have to distill their features down to a few structural elements, and rely on Unicode (and easier Unicode input methods) to handle what is currently being done with ASCII hacks.
A keyboard with OLED keycaps that change depending on the context would be reason enough to get a new laptop altogether, even though I have a brand new one.
As someone who context-switches from XCode to IntelliJ to Photoshop to Emacs, sometimes I confuse the shortcuts, and I don't learn more shortcuts because I'm afraid they will not carry over to other programs. Having discoverable shortcuts would be amazing.
We have Unicode but most of its symbols are a pain to generate on conventional keyboards.
We have touch-screens but desktop computer keyboards don’t offer them and software on phones/pads still tries a bit too hard to emulate a conventional keyboard layout.
Imagine if all standard keyboards had touch displays on the side to quickly flip between tables of related symbols, optionally with some context-sensitive mode? Then, instead of having to use creative ASCII tricks to make it “simple” to describe what you want, you just do it through your input device.
Ultimately I think markup languages will have to distill their features down to a few structural elements, and rely on Unicode (and easier Unicode input methods) to handle what is currently being done with ASCII hacks.