Philosophy

The core design values behind each markup language.

HTML

Prioritizes forgiving, fault-tolerant parsing over strictness — browsers are expected to render even malformed HTML sensibly, favoring universal accessibility of content over syntactic correctness.

XML

Prioritizes strictness and well-formedness above all else — a single syntax error invalidates the whole document (“draconian error handling”), trading convenience for predictability and machine reliability.

Markdown

Prioritizes readability of the raw source text itself, aiming for formatting conventions so natural that the unrendered document is still pleasant and clear to read.

AsciiDoc

Prioritizes being a complete, unambiguous authoring format for long-form technical documentation, extending plain-text readability with first-class support for structure that Markdown leaves to extensions or convention.

reStructuredText

Prioritizes unambiguous, well-defined parsing rules above informal convention, giving every construct one clear, documented syntax rather than tolerating multiple ways to express the same thing.

LaTeX

Prioritizes semantic markup over direct visual control — authors describe what something is (a section, a citation, an equation) and let the typesetting engine decide how it looks, in the same spirit as separating content from presentation.