What really kills me is that Gruber, Arment, and other ranters in that clique (e.g. some well-known tech journalists) have attached themselves to a larger desig

What really kills me is that Gruber, Arment, and other ranters in that clique (e.g. some well-known tech journalists) have attached themselves to a larger design-driven philosophy. A pillar of this includes the notion of "it just works". Now, looking at the real-world problems that standardization efforts are aiming for, we have: 1. Markdown had a design and ecosystem which largely let it win an overwhelming majority of mindshare against other lightweight markup contenders. 2. As the ecosystem of websites, apps, and users of Markdown has grown so has the desire to have Markdown participate in workflow with a lifecycle outside of more than one app. In all likelihood that means there's more than one Markdown backend involved. While Markdown may be "done", it no longer completely "just works". This brings us to: 3. As multiple different standards efforts[1] have said, they'd like to solve the interoperability issue for their apps and Markdown's users. So, that generally means a standard. Markdown has been a de facto success with wide adoption. This creates a sense of community ownership. I'm unclear as to what's really going on with @gruber, but I can't wrap my head around his apparent failure to sensibly interact with the community around Markdown that wants to address these issues. Even if that interaction were just "I don't want any. Please rename and fork." (EDIT: apparently that has in fact been said[2].) [1] At least: the W3C group (now defunct) and Standard Markdown. [2] https://twitter.com/gruber/status/507590561172176897 https://twitter.com/gruber/status/507590561172176897