What would you add to Markdown? 🤔

Markdown 🔥

The language we use most likely at least of ones per day. If your job includes GitHub, then it's most likely more. Its what drives our README's, issues, pull requests, its the goto for creating posts here on Dev too.

While there has been some extended syntax to it since John Gruber created it. For instance CommonMark, GFM, and more, even Dev has an added extension with the Liquid tags.

If you had the change to add a new syntax that would be used on your favorite sites, what would you add? I would like to have an aligning extension that lets us align text, images, and more much more than adding.

<p align="center"></p>

Which isn't supported on all platforms. Since most remove HTML tags server-side when the content has uploaded. which to be fair is something they should never trust user-uploaded content. 👍

So, what would you add to Markdown?
Comment down below with your extension and start the discussion. 🙂

Comments

[JavaCode7]

Subtitles. Definitely subtitles. I don't really use them but I think they will be useful.

[Alfio]

A flowchart/sequence diagram/gantt/etc standard syntax, like Mermaid.js
Some sort of anchors to create easily things like index

[csgeek]

There are likely plugins that do this but latex math expressions world be nice.

Lots of platforms support syntax highlighting but not sure if there is a standard.

It'd be nice if code highlighting just worked uniformly.

[Kim Hallberg]

Not much of a math person myself, but that would be nice for users who read and write those expressions. 👍

[dlordi]

It would be nice to have a Copy to clipboard button next to code blocks (triple backticks). This is not a formatting feature but it would be really useful for code snippets!

[Carlos Chacin ☕👽]

Markdown is supposed to be and stay simple in terms of features, a better alternative and still simple is AsciiDoc

[Jacko]

Embedded video, highlighted text, and much more

[Kim Hallberg]

Yes to all of that. 🤘

[Pacharapol Withayasakpunt]

I have used Showdown.js for that it is easy to create extensions.

However, the most basic I would want, is markdown inside HTML. (data-markdown attribute is not supported in some parsers.)

Another feature is customized, is simplified table syntax.

I also added (scoped) CSS inside markdown, (with <style>).

[Kim Hallberg]

Scoped CSS would be so nice to have, I think with scoped CSS being correctly interpreted by the parser and limited correctly it could bring a lot of variety to what you can do with Markdown. 🙂

[Sean van Zuidam]

Support for the <details> element

[Kim Hallberg]

That would be useful. 👍

[Sm0ke]

target="_blank" option for urls & images

[Simon]

Interesting. I actually decide this on my own and usually open links in tabs by pressing a key.

[Kim Hallberg]

I can see that as being useful in situations, just hope it will have the noreferrer and noopener attributes added by default then. 😉

[Ryan Faulhaber]

Less rigorous table syntax, at least in GFM. This is an idea stolen from the wonderful Org mode.

Tables in GFM have to be very strictly formatted. This is an issue I've run into on GitHub over and over again, so much so that I just use some external tool to deal with it.

In GFM, you have to write:

| heading 1 | heading 2 |
|-----------|-----------|
| foo       | baz       |
| bar       | quux      |
|           |           |

The equivalent could be written in Org as:

| heading 1 | heading 2|
|-
| foo | baz |
| bar | quux |
| | |

This is something Markdown should just steal, honestly!

[Simon]

Are you sure about this? I thought it just works, at least you don't need to make sure the columns are equal width. The header body separator will not work like this though. But yea, table syntax is kind of weird, I agree.

[Kim Hallberg]

Ooh yes, better tables absolutely, even though it's something that's "old" and we don't talk about often, we do still use it, it's still the best way to display data without using something like grid IMO.