2. Coming back soon: Lisk Protocol documentation

At present, the protocol documentation is being updated to reflect the changes coming with the implementation of the new LIPs.

Shortly a new version will be published on docs.lisk.io that will comprise a high-level overview regarding the updated Lisk protocol. In addition, the Lisk Research team is working on much more extensive protocol documentation, which will also be published in the fullness of time.

3. Goodbye Markdown, Hello AsciiDoc!

One of the most fundamental and beneficial changes here is the conversion of the documentation files from Markdown to AsciiDoc.

Markdown is a well-known language, whereas AsciiDocs may be considered as relatively new to many users.

However, whilst both of them are lightweight markup languages, and therefore share a lot of similarities, there are various advantages of AsciiDoc over Markdown when writing extensive technical documentation.

Why Lisk chooses AsciiDoc

One standard, no flavors

In contrast to Markdown, AsciiDoc has no specific flavors and follows one uniform specification. This allows the true portability of AsciiDoc documents between different platforms.

At the beginning of 2019, AsciiDoctor started the process of an official AsciiDoc specification to prevent different flavors of AsciiDoc being developed.

Lastly, to extend the abilities of AsciiDoc further, it is possible to use AsciiDoc extensions.

AsciiDoc support is growing

As AsciiDoc is currently less popular than Markdown, hence one of the disadvantages is that there are not many popular tools at present that offer support.

AsciiDoctor, the newest and most popular implementation of AsciiDoc, is already supported by Github, so it is actually possible to write the README files in AsciiDoc as well.

In addition, some of the most popular editors provide plugins for AsciiDoc support such as Visual Studio Code and WebStorm. These plugins allow users to work conveniently and also have a live rendered preview.

Page attributes

Page attributes are an extremely powerful feature of AsciiDoc, as they allow the author to add various additional information to a document. Attributes are always defined at the top of the document, directly below the document title.