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Ask HN: The Markdown mess. Where to now for plain text formatting syntax?
Jeff Atwood et al recently attempted to come up with a better defined standard for Markdown.
The original author, John Gruber, took exception to this for whatever reason, ultimately forcing Atwood and his associates to entirely remove the "Markdown" name from their effort to standardise/improve. This can't have been good for what is now called "CommonMark", ultimately now a spiritual successor to Markdown, but now lacking close association with the original.
So where to now for plain text formatting syntax? Things now appear more fragmented than ever.
- GuiA 12y agoJust do what works for you (use Gruber's spec if it solves your problem, use Common Markdown if it solves your problem, use your own hand rolled solution if it solves your problem), and ignore the noise. Natural selection will do its thing.
- brudgers 12y agoAtwood has been working on the issues with markdown since the early days of StackOverflow [2008]. He began looking at a new parser as early as 2010. The folks at Github have been likewise working around the problems inherent in Gruber's definition. Many of these are due to his definition not being based on a context free grammar and become important at the scale of sites like StackOverflow and Github. Is the world fragmented? Hardly. There's less difference between CommonMark Markdown and Gruber's Classic Markdown than between the 31 flavors of regular expressions that programmers deal with every day. Why didn't Gruber just set Markdown free? Well you'd have to ask him. My suspicion is that Github drives traffic to his web properties by linking to his documentation as the canonical source. Atwood being a Microsoft developer probably doesn't sit well either. But in the long run, it won't matter any more than Larry Wall not getting Ken Thompson's blessing when he wrote Perl's regular expression engine. People will use what works, and if CommonMark Markdown works better than Gruber Markdown, then that's what will stick.
- hoodoof 12y agoJeff Atwood's Discourse is Ruby On Rails - I don't think he's committed to Microsoft exclusively.
- brudgers 12y agoYeah, that's true. Then again, his reason is the priority he placed on open-source, and the licensing is more complex on the MicroSoft stack. http://blog.codinghorror.com/why-ruby/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/why-ruby/
- hoodoof 12y ago"GrubDown" and "WoodDown" perhaps? Or "DownGrub" and "DownWood"?
- dragonwriter 12y agoAs before the recent brouhaha, AsciiDoc.