I would strongly recommend thinking through some of the "political"
decisions before getting too far into this.
1) "Markdown" officially refers to the implementation and syntax created
by John Gruber.
2) "Markdown" the perl implementation has not seen a bug fix in nearly
10 years.
3) Gruber's voice has been noticeably absent from the list for a long
time, except for a comment that I recall as basically saying that
Markdown was essentially feature complete as far as he was concerned.
4) Gruber has specifically said in the past that new projects could not
coopt the "Markdown" name and would have to be clearly disambiguated.
For example, I would assume that anyone other than Gruber could not
create "Markdown 2.0" to be the Markdown to rule them all...
5) I don't have numbers to back this up, but would strongly suspect that
at this point very few people who think they use "Markdown" actually
are. Most are using various derivatives that have made wide-ranging
decisions on how to handle edge cases, etc. For most users, whose needs
are very basic, the distinction is probably academic. But I would
suggest that these distinctions are very important when it comes to
official standards.
I would propose that if there is to be an official standard based on
"Markdown", it would first require defining what "Markdown" is. To do
that would (hopefully) require a more formalized description of the
grammar. If Gruber were to sign off on allowing this to use the
"Markdown" name, fantastic. But if not, a difficult decision would need
to be made:
1) Build a standard based on Markdown.pl, bugs and all, and keep the
"Markdown" name.
2) Develop a formalized version of the core syntax of Markdown, and base
the standard on this. Unless it were to receive Gruber's blessing, it
would have to be named something other than Markdown.
3) Continue to use the term "Markdown" as a vague term that refers to a
loosely related collection of tools, leaving users to wonder why a given
document works with one tool, and not others. At some point, a new
common standard (e.g. "Son of Markdown" or whatever) may or may not
arise that would require redefining all of this stuff. Granted, efforts
to organize such a standard have thus far failed despite multiple
enthusiastic discussions over the years on this list.
My $.02....
FTP
On 7/9/14, 11:49 AM, Sean Leonard wrote:
Hi markdown-discuss Folks:
I am working on a Markdown effort in the Internet Engineering Task
Force, to standardize on "text/markdown" as the Internet media type for
all variations of Markdown content. You can read my draft here:
<http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-seantek-text-markdown-media-type-00>.
The proposal is already getting traction. Is there anyone on this list
that is interested in participating or helping this effort? In
particular we need to better understand and document what versions of
Markdown exist, so that either Markdown as a family of informal syntaxes
will start to converge, or if not, that Markdown variations have an easy
way to be distinguished from one another. (See the "flavor" parameter
discussed in the draft.)
The draft is currently being discussed on [email protected].
Kind regards,
Sean Leonard
Author of Markdown IETF Draft
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