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As Gruber said: > If you liked the original, which I created dictatorially, what makes you think you’d like a sequel from by a committee? What dictator ever a
by buro9 14y ago
As Gruber said:
> If you liked the original, which I created dictatorially, what makes you think you’d like a sequel from by a committee?
What dictator ever accepted that a group of people could do a better job?
The best thing for this new effort is to now embrace the new name (tentatively Rockdown), create the test suite and move on.
Markdown becomes one of the influencers in the footnotes, and hopefully we all get a highly consistent and implementable syntax and set of parsers that we can use.
My hope is that the "committee" isn't open to anyone joining it, or open to too much external influence. dgreensp (from Meteor) seemed to hope that too, and was reaching out to just the right people who could make a difference and whose views were valuable.
It's a shame Jeff felt the need to create such a spectacle when this could've just been presented fait accompli without having such a distracting spectacle.
dgreensp had it right though, but just didn't account for Jeff's character (although he clearly did account for Gruber's by not CC'ing him originally). Here's hoping that he now ignores both of them and pushes forward anyway.
Consistent tests that lead to consistent and implementable parsers... these are good goals.
If Markdown has to have a 5% change in it's DNA to make this work, then this is also a good thing.
I hope dgreensp isn't feeling too disheartened by the clash of personalities of Gruber and Jeff.
- qznc 14y agoThe best defense against "anyone joining" in my opinion is time and boredom. A standardization takes at least one year and while in the first week everybody and his pet wants to add their opinion those people usually disappear after a few weeks. Personally, I have a wishlist of people who should sign the resulting spec. Jeff and Gruber, of course. Furthermore the implementors of solid and/or widely used markdown libraries (Pandoc, MultiMarkdown, Markdown Extra, etc). A few markdown users (Doxygen, Github, ...)
- masklinn 14y ago> I have a wishlist of people who should sign the resulting spec. Jeff and Gruber, of course. Why them? > A few markdown users (Doxygen, Github, ...) Github are also implementors, hence the 2 or 3-years old "github-flavored markdown". https://github.com/vmg/sundown https://github.com/vmg/sundown is their core library, with https://github.com/vmg/redcarpet https://github.com/vmg/redcarpet as the ruby interface.
- qznc 14y agoWhy Jeff and Gruber? Popularity and Politics. Jeff is already called the initiator of the specification although he just reacted to an email of David Greenspan. [0] Without Gruber giving at least a nod of approval it will always have an "unofficial" feel. [0] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/the-future-of-markdown.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/the-future-of-markd...
- Tyrannosaurs 14y agoI don't think Jeff was trying to create a spectacle, I honestly think he's all about the community and was trying to be inclusive. What both Jeff and Gruber bring to the party is profile. As the article points out, there are already variants of Markdown that fix many of the problems but it would seem none of them have gained traction. If you can get the founder of StackOverflow / StackExchange and the original creator of Markdown on-board, there's a good chance that whatever you come up with will get some momentum. Specifications and test suites are all well and good but if no-one uses them what was the point? I suspect Jeff, as well as being someone with a good track record on making stuff happen, was an attempted solution to that problem.
- jspthrowaway 14y ago> What both Jeff and Gruber bring to the party is profile. As the article points out, there are already variants of Markdown that fix many of the problems but it would seem none of them have gained traction. Sounds like the market has spoken.