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Gruber gets credit for creating it AND for holding it back. Markdown needs a common standard. Gruber needs to hand Markdown over to folks who will let his legac

Gruber gets credit for creating it AND for holding it back. Markdown needs a common standard. Gruber needs to hand Markdown over to folks who will let his legacy shine.

jessaustin 10y ago
You write "credit for... holding it back" in an ironic sense, but ISTM that's really the only reason that markdown has seen wide adoption while numerous other simple markup languages have not. There haven't been dozens of different doodads grafted on at different times in different fashions to confuse users and converters, so people just use it and it just works.
- Ajedi32 10y ago
  > There haven't been dozens of different doodads grafted on at different times in different fashions to confuse users and converters Oh, but there have. For instance, code fences are not part of the original markdown spec, but are commonly supported in just about every implementation out there, and are rendered in about [7 different ways][1] depending on which converter you're using. Play around for a little in BabelMark and you'll see why a standard is needed. [1]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2/?normalize=1&text=%60%60%60%0Acode+here%0A%60%60%60 http://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2/?normalize=1&text=%60%6...
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    Well that's one doodad, and apparently it has had the effect I predicted. Never mind, go ahead and have fun with your new super-markdown. One rather doubts it will displace actual markdown anytime soon.
    - Ajedi32 10y ago
      That's exactly the problem: there is no "actual Markdown". Just a bunch of mutually incompatible competing implementations. If something like CommonMark had existed from the beginning, we wouldn't have this issue because everyone would be following the standard.
  - marssaxman 10y ago
    What is a "code fence"?
    - Ajedi32 10y ago
      It's an alternate way of annotating code blocks which doesn't require you to indent every line (because that can be tedious for longer code snippets), and allows you to explicitly specify the language to use for syntax highlighting. Example: ```javascript // JavaScript code here ``` It's used extensively on GitHub.
      - marssaxman 10y ago
        Thanks. I've seen that but hadn't connected the name to the syntax.
- pluma 10y ago
  Except that's not what happened. GitHub-flavoured Markdown was pretty widespread before CommonMark arrived. Also the problem with his "original specification" is that there isn't one. There's a description that demonstrates the basic syntax and a buggy implementation in Perl that isn't being maintained.
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    Sure, and every time I use such a "custom" feature, I have to look up how it works. If markdown were less static, the whole language might be like that. That's fine for some uses, but not when the use is a simpler, more memorable way to generate html.
    - vertex-four 10y ago
      If Markdown were less static, you wouldn't have to find random implementation-specific documentation describing custom features - they'd be defined in the spec. You also wouldn't wind up in situations where two different Markdown implementations interpret the same Markdown text in two different ways, which happens surprisingly often. Markdown text is therefore always written for use with a specific implementation, and can't realistically be used as a text interchange format in e.g. email or any other federated system with multiple rendering implementations.
niftich 10y ago
Markdown is kind of like CSV, where common usage pre-dated both Gruber's script and future attempts at standardization. His co-author Aaron Swartz confirms [1] that Markdown was greatly inspired by (and is largely compatible with) the way people used to 'mark up' plain text in ways that were emergent and natural to them back in the email days. Therefore, the lack of formal syntax is, to them, a feature. This doesn't prevent forks, of course, but anyone who wants to perpetuate the 'Markdown legacy' should consider this. [1] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001189 http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001189
- Ajedi32 10y ago
  I understand the appeal of basing Markdown's syntax off of the way people naturally tend to structure unformatted text (and in fact, that's one of the reasons I love Markdown so much), but I'm still really confused as to why anyone would regard syntactic ambiguity as a feature. Leaving any sort of ambiguity in your spec inevitably leads to different implementations resolving those ambiguities in different ways, which confuses users and causes problems with interoperability. Is there some sort of upside to these syntactic ambiguities that I'm missing which might offset those obvious drawbacks?

Gruber gets credit for creating it AND for holding it back. Markdown needs a common standard. Gruber needs to hand Markdown over to folks who will let his legacy shine.

jessaustin 10y ago

You write "credit for... holding it back" in an ironic sense, but ISTM that's really the only reason that markdown has seen wide adoption while numerous other simple markup languages have not. There haven't been dozens of different doodads grafted on at different times in different fashions to confuse users and converters, so people just use it and it just works.

Ajedi32 10y ago
> There haven't been dozens of different doodads grafted on at different times in different fashions to confuse users and converters Oh, but there have. For instance, code fences are not part of the original markdown spec, but are commonly supported in just about every implementation out there, and are rendered in about [7 different ways][1] depending on which converter you're using. Play around for a little in BabelMark and you'll see why a standard is needed. [1]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2/?normalize=1&text=%60%60%60%0Acode+here%0A%60%60%60 http://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2/?normalize=1&text=%60%6...
- jessaustin 10y ago
  Well that's one doodad, and apparently it has had the effect I predicted. Never mind, go ahead and have fun with your new super-markdown. One rather doubts it will displace actual markdown anytime soon.
  - Ajedi32 10y ago
    That's exactly the problem: there is no "actual Markdown". Just a bunch of mutually incompatible competing implementations. If something like CommonMark had existed from the beginning, we wouldn't have this issue because everyone would be following the standard.
- marssaxman 10y ago
  What is a "code fence"?
  - Ajedi32 10y ago
    It's an alternate way of annotating code blocks which doesn't require you to indent every line (because that can be tedious for longer code snippets), and allows you to explicitly specify the language to use for syntax highlighting. Example: ```javascript // JavaScript code here ``` It's used extensively on GitHub.
    - marssaxman 10y ago
      Thanks. I've seen that but hadn't connected the name to the syntax.
pluma 10y ago
Except that's not what happened. GitHub-flavoured Markdown was pretty widespread before CommonMark arrived. Also the problem with his "original specification" is that there isn't one. There's a description that demonstrates the basic syntax and a buggy implementation in Perl that isn't being maintained.
- jessaustin 10y ago
  Sure, and every time I use such a "custom" feature, I have to look up how it works. If markdown were less static, the whole language might be like that. That's fine for some uses, but not when the use is a simpler, more memorable way to generate html.
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    If Markdown were less static, you wouldn't have to find random implementation-specific documentation describing custom features - they'd be defined in the spec. You also wouldn't wind up in situations where two different Markdown implementations interpret the same Markdown text in two different ways, which happens surprisingly often. Markdown text is therefore always written for use with a specific implementation, and can't realistically be used as a text interchange format in e.g. email or any other federated system with multiple rendering implementations.

niftich 10y ago

Markdown is kind of like CSV, where common usage pre-dated both Gruber's script and future attempts at standardization. His co-author Aaron Swartz confirms [1] that Markdown was greatly inspired by (and is largely compatible with) the way people used to 'mark up' plain text in ways that were emergent and natural to them back in the email days. Therefore, the lack of formal syntax is, to them, a feature. This doesn't prevent forks, of course, but anyone who wants to perpetuate the 'Markdown legacy' should consider this. [1] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001189 http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001189

Ajedi32 10y ago
I understand the appeal of basing Markdown's syntax off of the way people naturally tend to structure unformatted text (and in fact, that's one of the reasons I love Markdown so much), but I'm still really confused as to why anyone would regard syntactic ambiguity as a feature. Leaving any sort of ambiguity in your spec inevitably leads to different implementations resolving those ambiguities in different ways, which confuses users and causes problems with interoperability. Is there some sort of upside to these syntactic ambiguities that I'm missing which might offset those obvious drawbacks?