One of the nice things about Markdown and reStructuredText is that there is actually a substantial overlap in their markup formatting - it is not too difficult to write documents in the common subset, e.g. this brief guide that I wrote up documenting the common subset: http://gist.github.com/1855764 (you can see the same file interpreted as Markdown and reStructuredText there).
My biggest complaint with the various lightweight/plaintext markup formats is the sheer variety and incompatibility of their markup syntax. Pandoc goes a long way to being able to convert the more popular ones easily, but it would have been nice if there had not been so much gratuitous re-invention of the wheel. It's kind of sad that the MultiMarkdown table format is incompatible with the tables in reStructuredText.
Comments
One of the nice things about Markdown and reStructuredText is that there is actually a substantial overlap in their markup formatting - it is not too difficult to write documents in the common subset, e.g. this brief guide that I wrote up documenting the common subset: http://gist.github.com/1855764 (you can see the same file interpreted as Markdown and reStructuredText there).
My biggest complaint with the various lightweight/plaintext markup formats is the sheer variety and incompatibility of their markup syntax. Pandoc goes a long way to being able to convert the more popular ones easily, but it would have been nice if there had not been so much gratuitous re-invention of the wheel. It's kind of sad that the MultiMarkdown table format is incompatible with the tables in reStructuredText.