John MacFarlane is a professor of philosophy at the University of California and a programmer. He is the author of the documentation tool Pandoc and one of the authors of the CommonMark standard. CommonMark isstrong definitionMarkdown specification, which defines many details to avoid ambiguity.

Recently, John MacFarlane released a lightweight markup syntax:Djot(pronounced: /dʒɑt/). Djot includes many features derived from CommonMark, while fixing some issues that made CommonMark syntax complex and difficult to parse efficiently.

According to John MacFarlane, Djot is an upgraded version of Markdown, originally to realize some of the ideas he proposed in Beyond Markdown.

According to reports, Djot has more comprehensive functions than CommonMark, supports definition lists, footnotes, tables, several new inline formats (insert, delete, highlight, superscript, subscript), mathematics, smart punctuation, can be applied to Any attribute element, and a generic container for block-level, inline-level, and raw content.

In Djot’s syntax, the parsing of hard line breaks is different from common Markdown.

For example, using Markdown can be written like this:

This is some text.
## My next heading

But in Djot, if you use block-level elements, you must use hard line breaks:

This is some text.

## My next heading

The same is true for lists:

- one
  - two
  - three

- one

  - two
  - three

Written in the interpreted language Lua, Djot’s interpreter is said to be fast and can generate ASTs, render HTML, and syntax highlighting or linting tools.

Djot Syntax Explanation: https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/jgm/djot/blob/master/doc/syntax.html.