[xwiki-devs] [Idea] Make Markdown syntax available as an optional subset of the XWiki 2.1 syntax

Hi Devs, as you probably noticed it, Markdown has recently become somewhat of a reference syntax for many developer tools, most notably GitHub. I have recently discussed with teams using XWiki who are also using GitHub and Slack and who are interested in being able to use Markdown syntax inside XWiki. Although it is already possible to use Markdown syntax in XWiki in a limited way <http://rendering.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Markdown11>, I don't think that a wiki could really work with only Markdown, due to the following limitations: 1. We have invested a lot in the XWiki rendering and the XWiki 2.1 syntax in order to make them address a lot of use cases and work seamlessly with the WYSIWYG editor 2. Conversely, Markdown syntax is very limited by design <https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax> and does not support many of the important features of XWiki syntax, forcing users to rely on HTML for a lot of use cases What's interesting however is that Markdown syntax is very close to XWiki syntax in a number of regards, notably line breaks, bold and lists. Some notable differences include the syntax for links, images and code blocks. My line of thinking is the following: what if we made it possible as an option for users of XWiki 2.1 syntax to have XWiki interpret the main elements of Markdown syntax? In practice, this would mean adding a set of 5-10 additional rules to the rendering engine. The obvious benefit would be to improve adoption of XWiki by dev teams who are already familiar with Markdown. I don't see any obvious drawbacks (besides the need to code and maintain the feature of course), but I clearly don't master all the subtleties of the XWiki rendering engine. Thanks, Guillaume