I use pandoc for generating my personal website from Markdown. I really like this statement from the "philosophy" section of the manual:

> ... while pandoc allows the embedding of raw HTML, it discourages it, and provides other, non-HTMLish ways of representing important document elements like definition lists, tables, mathematics, and footnotes.

At the moment, some of my pages are in HTML because the appropriate feature does not exist in markdown. (for example, I use the HTML `details` element). I could include HTML in the page but there are constraints there (I can't get nice syntax highlighting, and I can't indent properly). I want to keep the simple style of markdown, but to "add syntax" that converts to the markup I want. Obviously you'd have to come up with syntax that doesn't clash with the existing one.

I notice that there are various extensions to Markdown added to the Pandoc parser. I wonder how easy it is to write and add new ones? For comparison, there is another project, markdown-it which provides facility for arbitrary extension of markdown, but is tightly scoped only to HTML.

I do not understand the workings of pandoc in detail, but I do understand the basic idea - that there is a central "document" model, which defines things like tables, lists and so on abstractly - and each format has a reader and writer in terms of this model. It's possible that the features I want to add are not general enough to align with the goals of pandoc.

Finally, if you know any other projects that are working in a similar direction, I'd be very interested to hear about them!

Thanks,
Dan