D★Mark is strict in its input, and the chance of accidentally having unprocessed D★Mark in generated output is very low.

This is unlike Markdown, where most implementations either silently ignore markup they don’t recognise, or print a warning that is easy to miss. Badly formatted links are commonplace, and I’ve spotted broken Markdown links such as (some link target)[//example.com] in the wild, multiple times.

Markdown (with its dozen variations) is bound to have this issue, because its syntax is complex.

On the other hand, D★Mark’s syntax is simple, and it’s always unambiguous whether some piece of markup is intended to be markup or not. D★Mark spits out no warnings, and errors out instead. If there is ambiguity, it will print out a helpful error message and refuse to continue. Consider the following:

 31%% of all statistics are made up.

The double percentage sign is needed here as an escape sequence. The % symbol is typically used to start an element in inline form (e.g. %code{bloop}), and to get a literal percentage sign, the % needs to be escaped as %%.

D★Mark could have guessed the intention of the writer, but this introduces some level of ambiguity. It also introduces unexpected behavior: if 31% of all statistics were allowed markup, it would make sense for 31%ish of all statistics to be allowed as well. %ish would be very similar to the inline form of an ish element though. Should D★Mark error on this? Should it output a literal 31%ish?

The ambiguity prevents a clear answer to these questions, and so D★Mark is strict and does not allow ambiguity.