While this alludes nicely to the “question-answer-dichotomy”, I find the prefix use of question and exclamation marks—typographically—rather un-intuitive and resembling programming notations. Actually more intuitive (in this sense) would, for some folks, be
¿ term, glossary entry, question
¡ description, definition, answer
(Okay, just kidding!)
But in fact the main disadvantage is that this would just render as
? term, glossary entry, question ! description, definition, answer
in any Markdown implementation out there.
A slight variant of this idea would provide at least a readable fall-back rendering, exploiting the fact that we already have two different “unordered” list item markers:
* term:
* glossary entry:
* question:
- description, definition, answer
And is not really less intuitive either in my opinion. (Using > instead of - for the <DD> element indication would produce even nicer results in the HTML default style, where <BLOCKQUOTE> is just rendered with narrower margins. Alas, this might go too far in mis-using existing syntax.)
Or you might find + / - more appealing:
+ term, glossary entry, question:
- description, definition, answer
[Edit:] In the apples-and-oranges discussion over there I came up with this syntax (using MIDDLE DOT · as a “visible SPACE” here):
term:··
glossary entry:··
question:··
····description, definition, answer
I think this looks best (in the typescript, without the distracting “·” characters), and still renders reasonably in unaware Markdown implementations. But it’s probably not for you if you hate the end-of-line SPACE rule of Markdown!