That's nice. When I first encountered Markdown, almost a decade ago, I loved it. To say that I now hate it would be going a little bit far, but only a little;

That's nice. When I first encountered Markdown, almost a decade ago, I loved it. To say that I now hate it would be going a little bit far, but only a little; I'm awfully close to that. This change in opinion has occurred almost entirely because, every single time I encounter something that "accepts Markdown", I have to spend some time investigating its documentation to find out what ill-specified sui generis variation of Markdown it supports, and then, usually, also poke at the implementation in order to find out where it differs from the docs. Every single time. This would not happen if Markdown were well enough specified that developers could just drop in a parser library and be done. Gruber's currency? Everyone knows he invented Markdown. Everyone loves him for it. And everyone who has ever dealt with Markdown more than once knows that Gruber didn't take it far enough. He's had ten years in which to do so, and he hasn't done it. Now the community, led by Atwood et al., is acting to redress the lack. That Gruber should be upset by their calling their standardized Markdown "Standard Markdown", when he's had and squandered a decade in which to address the plainly evident need for that very thing, leaves me utterly unmoved. If it bothers him badly enough, let him sue! And we'll all see how well that works out for him. Otherwise, his "currency" would I think gain more from almost any other course of action than further prolonging the exercise in sour grapes which his Twitter appears to have become.