Interesting, we first thought about having both arguments (i.e. filenames, urls and other identifiers) and options (i.e. key-value pairs which we call attributes) as well. But then we dropped the former since having both is somewhat redundant—you can simply write :youtube[funny cat]{id=1234 fullscreen=true} instead of :youtube[funny cat](1234){fullscreen=true}—and it has the potential to confuse users unnecessarily.
(Note that you can still have attributes as well as content, the difference being that attribute-key and -values are plain strings, while content is markdown as well.)
Some sphinx/docutils features do not map neatly with the current extension we are discussing here.
@lu_zero, are you talking about the markdown directives proposal having no arguments, or?
Do you guys think this poses a major problem for mapping to docutils?
@ericholscher, would love to hear your feedback on the proposel in the first post in this topic, which I’ve updated a few times as the discussion progressed.