Typst is a way to define a document. Headers, paragraphs, figures, equations, tables, etc. it is a direct competitor to LaTeX and maybe in some ways similar to Word, which provides a GUI for an XML defined document.
Pandoc is a converter, which given a document in one document description language outputs a document in another document description language.
What is exciting about Typst HTML support is that its goal is that it has first class support for both PDF and HTMl, which is obviously preferable to something like pandoc, which always has to rely on an intermediate representation of the document, before a conversion can happen.
PanDoc has its own version of Markdown that (more or less?) maps 1:1 to the intermediate representation in PanDoc, plus allows embedding other formats when necessary, or conditionally include some content only for some output formats.
It's a great format to use for editing, since it converts so well to all the other formats (including Typst?).
>PanDoc has its own version of Markdown that (more or less?) maps 1:1 to the intermediate representation in PanDoc
Which is bad if you want a complex document, since the intermediate representation of pandoc can not represent all typst features.
Also, I do not understand what your argument is. Pandoc and typst are not competing, they are different pieces of software with different goals. Pandocs markdown is also not competing with typst, since they are completely different ways to define a document. Typst is vastly more complex, it even includes its own scripting language. Pandoc also doesn't output PDF, except by calling some external tool, which then compiles a pandoc output format to HTML. It is fundamentally different to typst.
I agree they are not competing at all, and I will definitely consider Typst as an alternative to LaTeX, which to me is one of the output formats I use in PanDoc, and I might end up using Typst instead of LaTeX as an intermediate format when generating PDFs. I have not had to fall back to write LaTeX in several years and tend to get away with at most a few lines of inlined LaTeX in my Markdown files, and I expect it will be possible to inline some Typst code if necessary as well. Happy with PanDoc's Lua filters when I need to script something.
Typst is a way to define a document. Headers, paragraphs, figures, equations, tables, etc. it is a direct competitor to LaTeX and maybe in some ways similar to Word, which provides a GUI for an XML defined document.
Pandoc is a converter, which given a document in one document description language outputs a document in another document description language.
What is exciting about Typst HTML support is that its goal is that it has first class support for both PDF and HTMl, which is obviously preferable to something like pandoc, which always has to rely on an intermediate representation of the document, before a conversion can happen.