I recently found out that the author is John MacFarlane, a philosophy professor I have read papers from in totally unrelated contexts. I was more than surprised to see that he is the original author of pandoc. It boggles my mind how someone with an academic career in a somewhat unrelated field can have a GitHub profile like him. It's really impressive.
On topic, though, preceding sublists with empty lines is a complete non-starter for me. However, since I don't hard-wrap lines (goal 7), but use soft-wrap only, I am not in the target audience anyways.
> I recently found out that the author is John MacFarlane, a philosophy professor I have read papers from in totally unrelated contexts. I was more than surprised to see that he is the original author of pandoc.
Professor MacFarlane must have really hated writing his papers in Latex.
I get the thrust of "not wanting to pay for hard-wrapping" but I'm not sure I understand what you think a better design would be; does a single newline always introduce a new block element?
No. Within a paragraph it would introduce a hard line break, e.g. like you'd use for poetry. You'd use two line breaks, i.e. a blank line, to start a new paragraph.
Yeah that stuck out to me as the most objectionable thing at first glance too. Otherwise it looks reasonably sane. I currently use AsciiDoc and it's ok but this looks slightly better I would say.
On topic, though, preceding sublists with empty lines is a complete non-starter for me. However, since I don't hard-wrap lines (goal 7), but use soft-wrap only, I am not in the target audience anyways.