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Comment by simplehuman | Hacker News Reader

This is great! A couple of years back, there was a failed attempt at standardizing this - http://www.vfmd.org/ and http://www.vfmd.org/vfmd-spec/specification/. GitHub given it's popularity will surely succeed more.

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GitHub's spec here is based on [CommonMark][1], which has been around for a while now, and [was originally authored][2] by a group of representatives from GitHub, Reddit, and Stack Exchange.

[1]: http://commonmark.org/

[2]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-flavored-markdown/

based on, compatible with, or is common mark?

I'd hate to see them pushing a different spec around, that would solve nothing

Some quick reading of the linked article says this spec provides a few optional, superset features on top of CommonMark, that it did not contain (like tables, etc).

> based on, compatible with, or is common mark?

The first two. [The GFM spec][1] is literally just CommonMark with a few extra extensions added. They even highlighted the new sections green in the spec to make it clear where the GFM spec differs from CommonMark. Everything else is word-for-word identical.

[1]: https://github.github.com/gfm/

There was also Common Mark (http://commonmark.org/), which failed IMHO mostly due to John Gruber taking offense at their first choice of name, Common Markdown. Will formalising this as 'GitHub Flavored Markdown' similarly cause offense?

GitHub Flavored Markdown has been a thing for a while. The only difference is that now they have a formal spec for it.

Also, CommonMark failed? News to me. Last I heard it was still under active development, years after the drama with Gruber.

IIRC, their first name choice was Standard Markdown. I don't blame Gruber for being upset at that.

> I don't blame Gruber for being upset at that.

I do, when he has abandoned his project's raggedy implementation yet defends the trademark viciously.

He hasn't abandoned it.

Last release is from 2004 and he is not interested at all to fix the fact that it is severely underspecified..

It's underspecified for what others want. If it didn't do what Gruber needed it to do, surely he would extend it, no?

You have to go look at the source code of Grubers implementation to figure out what markdown actually is. Or do some empirical studies with different inputs. That is what I mean by underspecified. His specification is not detailed enough to implement a markdown parser. So in reality it is abondonware.

Who knows, but it'd be pretty irrational if it did. Whether it was fair or not, the "Common Markdown" name caused a kerfluffle because of the implication that it was claiming to be the One True Markdown. The name "GitHub Flavored Markdown" only implies that it's base Markdown plus GitHub extras, plus it's been known by that name for a long time now.

IIRC, original name was "Standard Markdown" which the original author had issue with... "Common Mark" or "Github Flavored Markdown" not implying such.

Did it 'fail'? It seems to have a decent amount of use. And it fixed a bunch of problems with the original Markdown spec (or lack thereof).

I suppose since one of their goals was to get Github and StackExchange 'out of the markdown business' but neither use CommonMark, and further, Github now has put work into creating their own spec, they failed in that aspect.

> Github now has put work into creating their own spec

A big aspect of the post is talking about how GFM is now a set of extensions to CommonMark. This is a huge win, not a failure.

> one of their goals was to get Github and StackExchange 'out of the markdown business' but neither use CommonMark

FWIW, StackExchange [uses CommonMark][1] for their new StackOverflow Documentation site and has [been planning][2] to migrate Q&A to CommonMark for some time now.

[1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/125148/implement-st...

[2]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/238957/192171

The Rust ecosystem has used Markdown for a long time, but is moving to CommonMark as we speak.

Given this news from GitHub, it's very exciting.

TFA is literally all about how GFM is based on the CommonMark spec.

Previous discussion on the name: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8270771

It didn't fail. CommonMark is the standard implemented in Pandoc, and the projects share an author.

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