I invented a markup language, thus violating a fundamental rule of
computer usage:

*Never invent your own markup language.*

There are several very good reasons for this rule:

1. It produces a proliferation of difficult-to-remember standards.
What is the syntax for representing italics in MediaWiki markup?
In ReStructured Text? Do the rules for enumerated lists differ
between GitHub-flavored Markdown and Pandoc-flavored Markdown?
Why would you unleash on the world a _new_ standard with
subtly _different_ italic syntax?

2. Parsing is really difficult, and you probably will make a
mistake. This is _especially_ tedious for implementation-defined
standards: poor
[John MacFarlane](http://johnmacfarlane.net/)
has to figure out every single unexpected parsing behavior
that shows up in
[John Gruber's regexp-heavy Markdown script](https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/)
so he can attempt to
[replicate every single edge case](http://pandoc.org/README.html#pandocs-markdown).
And we're very lucky that McFarlane cares about this—plenty of formats
have weird edge cases in every parser that no other parser replicates
perfectly, leading to weird documents that no parser quite gets
right and no parser can agree on. (To say nothing of the fact that
poorly-written parsers can even be
[security risks]()!

3. Are you _really sure_ that your use-case isn't covered by any
of the myriad other markup formats? Are you _really sure_? There
are Markdown implementations for every language and they've been
tested a lot more thoroughly than whatever you're coming up with.

