Introducing Podlite, a lightweight block-based markup language

Hey everyone! 🚀

I'm excited to introduce a new markup language called Podlite. It's designed to make documentation, blogging, educational materials, and much more, a breeze to create and manage.

Key features of Podlite include:

• Blocks as the basic unit: Each document is built from blocks, which are the basic units that can have their own defined attributes.
• Flexible linking: Link blocks together in various relationships.
• Formula support: Perfect for academic and scientific documentation.
• Markdown support: Love Markdown? Podlite does too. It includes a standard block for Markdown, so you can switch modes seamlessly.
• Rich content support: Tables, images, table of contents, and all sorts of lists are all supported.
• Extensibility: Extend Podlite with your own custom blocks and inline codes to fit your needs

Podlite doesn't adhere to any specific programming language. This allows it to be embedded in any programming language that supports block-level comments, or multi-line comments.

For example, in JavaScript:

/*
=head1 Documentation

=begin Mermaid
graph LR
        A-->B
        B-->C
        C-->A
        D-->C
=end Mermaid
=begin markdown

# header

 * text
 * text

=end markdown
*/

open this sample at pod6.in

Blocks can be represented in three equivalent forms: delimited style, paragraph style, and abbreviated style.

=begin table :caption<Summary>
  Constants           1
  Variables           10
=end table

=for table :caption<Summary>
  Constants           1
  Variables           10

=table
  Constants           1
  Variables           10

open this sample at pod6.in

Podlite is perfect for creating documentation, blogs, educational materials, and much more.

Current status of Podlite:

• currently in beta, with ongoing work for the next version.
• there's a reference implementation driving web publishing package and a web editor .
• and yes, there's an editor/viewer for desktop too: https://github.com/podlite/podlite-desktop.

This is an early announcement to gauge interest in this markup language.

Find out more:

• Specification : https://github.com/podlite/podlite-specs, [in html format]
• github: https://github.com/podlite ⭐️
• website: https://podlite.org
• web playground: https://pod6.in

The Podlite specification is published under the Artistic license 2.0.

I'd be incredibly grateful for any feedback and ideas.

Thank you so much for your time!

Best regards, Alex