If Gruber had released markdown and explicitly walked away from it, then yes, we would only be justified in appreciating his gift. (And I think anyone seriousl

If Gruber had released markdown and explicitly walked away from it, then yes, we would only be justified in appreciating his gift. (And I think anyone seriously using markdown has to conclude he did essentially release and walk away from the perl implementation. Aside from it being 6 to 12 times faster, there is no reason now to use it rather than the Text::MarkDown in CPAN -- which fixes its many, many, crippling bugs and maintains perfect compatability.) However, somehow or other, we've gotten the idea that Gruber is responsible for at least the ongoing development of the spec. Atwood excerpts a recent mail from Gruber where he's clearly still trying to do that. I sorta get the impression Gruber wants to keep the markdown spec exactly as it is, although the last time he surfaced on mailing list it was to say that a proposed addition looked like a (rare) good idea. At least the internal underlines issue makes markdown a real PITA to use for any technical writing, and really needs to be fixed in the spec. The URL thing is debatable; while Atwood's newline suggestion misses the point of markdown. The risk is clearly that markdown will fragment with different sites handling these issues differently. There are many better ways to manage specs than what Gruber is doing.