Ok, and yes: I was in fact confused by your use of the term “attribute”, which has a well-defined meaning in the context of XML, and also is used in the CommonMark specification with the exact same meaning. You are of course free to name a non-terminal in a concrete syntax “attribute” (a perfectly reasonable name!), but don’t expect everyone to understand that you mean this from now on when you say “attribute” 
– But I think I see now where you’re coming from, thank you.
But I still can’t quite follow your argument
[…] less cumbersome than keeping track of the correct number (e.g. when changing the order) and their setup doesn’t automate list generation.One purpose of CM/MD is that it’s easy to type by hand without dedicated tools.
I’ve been writing “CM/MD” for years now, most of the time using “tools” like Vim (some times through the “It’s all text!” or “External editor” Mozilla add-ins, which I do warmly recommend), but often—right now!—I just type into an HTML text area the old-fashioned, stone-age way.
And not once did I miss the ability to re-number items in an ordered list there (but I do this regularly in Vim, using a filter in “:%!command” and similarly).
These two (personal) ways of typing Markdown text correspond IMO to two (objective) roles one can assign to the Markdown text as written:
-
As just a vehicle to get the content into whatever form is wanted: that’s what I’m doing right now, hacking into the
commonmark.orgtext area, and wrestling as always with the shi^H^H^H capricious Markdown parser used here. -
As a plain-text document of its own right: the Markdown syntax was designed with this in mind (too), and one can in fact format Markdown text in a way that the “source code” is quite clean and readable: that’s what I’m commonly aiming at when writing in Vim, and this includes operations like reformatting paragraphs (line breaking and indentation), using UTF-8 instead of character references, renumbering sections and list items, and so on.
You seem to assign neither role to your text: on the one hand, you complain about the “counter-intuitive” look of some part of the syntax, but on the other hand you decline to use the perfectly clean and intuitive-looking alternative (out of laz^H^H^Hconvenience or lack of proper tools).
You said nothing about “continuation lines” or line breaking: do “sloppy” lines (as allowed in Markdown) look “intuitive” in your mind? Why would you be content with the one (line format) but not the other (item numbers), seemingly lacking any tool to improve any of this? Do you ever use section numbers in your section headings—without any support from Markdown?
This reminds me of this discussion here about introducing the backslash-escape sequence “\ ⎵” (ie REVERSE SOLIDUS followed by SPACE) to denote NO-BREAK SPACE in CommonMark.
Typing “ ” or “ ” (let alone using a decent editor, or a simple pre-processing step like global search/replace) just seemed to be unacceptable for the original poster.