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Comment by zeveb | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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