AsciiDoc is amazing. Take another look at the architecture diagram. AsciiDoc is listed under the Proposed Text Edit: https://i.imgur.com/8IMpAkN.png

Pandoc can convert between Markdown and AsciiDoc, so it really isn't an either-or decision. For much of the blog you can tell pandoc to use AsciiDoc as the source document instead of Markdown. The conversion to ConTeXt will (should?) generate the same output.

One feature of AsciiDoc that's quite appealing is cross-references. The main reason I gravitated towards Markdown was because of its simple and terse syntax.

Thanks for your reply.

Well I'm asking about retrospective. Today you have to do a whole lot to markdown submit to your toolchain. Would asciidoc not have been better ?

Is the syntax of asciidoc that much worse ? It's still human readable

> Today you have to do a whole lot to markdown submit to your toolchain

The brunt of transcoding from Markdown to AsciiDoc can be accomplished in a single line, something like:

    find . -type f -name '*.md' -exec pandoc -f markdown -t asciidoc {} \;

AsciiDoc is a superset of Markdown, so pandoc should be able to do a nearly flawless job at converting:

https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-vs-markdown/

At that point it's a matter of updating a few build scripts to pass AsciiDoc files to pandoc instead of Markdown. I wouldn't say starting with AsciiDoc would have been better or worse, just different. Starting with Microsoft Word would have been worse.