Commanility for additional markup

For use with my own tools, I have created a number of markup elements which are very useful for scientific publishing -- mostly notable, author which is obvious and cite which we use to generate in text citations. This very thin piece of semantics is very useful and can be made to percolate through to the HTML layer, so it's easy to extract.

In one sense, it doesn't matter what the syntax is, but if it is shared, then it can minimize the need for tooling support, as well as increasing familiarity for authors.

For my usage, I simply make use of shortcodes like so: [author]Phillip Lord[/author]. A shared syntax, or failing that a shared vocabulary for this sort of markup would be a good thing.