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

Comments

[2colours]

Dear Alex,
how does this relate to pod6 or in more recent revisions of Raku technologies, RakuDoc? Is this meant to be a fork independent to the Raku project?
Regards

[Alexandr Zahatski]

Hi, @2colours !

Podlite is not tied to any specific programming language, so it's not directly linked to Raku.

However, it remains compatible with .pod6 files since it's based on the original Synopsis 26 specification.

Most likely, Podlite is an evolution of the ideas from the original Synopsis 26.😀

Thanks for your interest in Podlite!
with best,
Alex

PS. The link docs.raku.org/language/pod is simply user documentation for Synopsis 26, originally named as Pod, and later renamed to Pod6. However, it remains a page of user documentation.