Hacker News Reader

Comment by szhu | Hacker News Reader

fwiw Pandoc's author, John MacFarlane, is also behind these projects that try to unify the Markdown ecosystem:

- Babelmark, a tool to compare how different Markdown parsers interpret the same Markdown input. https://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2/

- CommonMark, the first formalized Markdown standard, and now the de-facto Markdown standard. https://commonmark.org/ (He's the first listed member of the team.)

I feel like John is probably the single largest contributor to what Markdown is today, other than perhaps the creator of Markdown. Thank you for your work!

View on HN

> other than perhaps the creator of Markdown.

The creator of Markdown hasn't touched it in over a decade and yet decided to throw a temper tantrum because CommonMark dared to initially call itself Standard Markdown.

As a software engineer working in a data interoperability role (not that I would claim authority, but pragmatic experience):

I'm not sure of the specifics but personally I prefer formats that don't evolve over time. So not changing a spec for over a decade should not be considered pathological but actually commendable, if the nature of spec is complete enough for it's purpose.

I know vanilla Markdown is too limited for some use cases. But that is no reason to "overwrite" it.

> I know vanilla Markdown is too limited for some use cases.

CommonMark does not make Markdown less vanilla -- it's not like GFM or one of the other standards that adds support for tables or other features.

From Jeff Atwood (who is one of the CommonMark creators):

> The goal of CommonMark is not to redefine what Markdown is, or change the syntax, but make it parseable and predictable.

https://talk.commonmark.org/t/what-changed-in-commonmark/15

Here's CommonMark's statement on why it exists:

https://spec.commonmark.org/0.29/#why-is-a-spec-needed-

CommonMark's entire purpose is to fix data interoperability.

> So not changing a spec for over a decade

The problem was there was no _specification_. It was a 'how to use' summary, And each implementation could be (and was) different in subtle edge cases.

The point of CommonMark was to define the specification and stick to it.

I agree with GP, I thought it rather sucky that he objected to using the name.

Various markdowns have extension mechanisms, they always have. That's not what the GP was talking about.

The general idea behind your points are sound and correct.

However, the problem is you seem to be generally ignorant of widely known points of knowledge about Markdown.

> not changing a spec for over a decade should not be considered pathological but actually commendable, if the nature of spec is complete enough for it's purpose

100% agree in theory, but Markdown's creator never wrote any spec. when creating it. Initiatives like CommonMark are efforts to specify and unspecified language, not to evolve nor replace any existing spec.

> So not changing a spec for over a decade should not be considered pathological but actually commendable, if the nature of spec is complete enough for it's purpose.

The "nature of the spec is complete enough for its purpose" is the part that's not met, though (at least in many people's minds). The Markdown "spec" (either the description written by Gruber or the `Markdown.pl` file) has ambiguities and inconsistent behavior. My understanding is that there were many requests from the community for this to be clarified, but it never was. So I think a decade of inattention is not commendable in this instance. The CommonMark landing page[0] has some more about this issue.

[0] https://commonmark.org/#why

I agree with your characterization. (I didn't always -- I actually advocated at the time for CommonMark to respect Gruber's wishes and create their own branding [1].)

[1] https://talk.commonmark.org/t/the-logo-and-name-should-proba...

Sure, Gruber didn't allow CommonMark to use the Markdown name, but I feel like that's not a super big deal compared to what he did do. The Markdown ecosystem wouldn't exist if Markdown hadn't been created in the first place! I'm not confident someone would have made something like Markdown if Markdown was never created: AsciiDoc and reStructuredText came out before Markdown but have not been as successful.

Gruber's original Markdown spec lacked formality -- and that's where CommonMark eventually filled the gaps -- but I think that Markdown's focus on user experience over technicality was the key to its success over competing formats and WYSIWYG editors (the real competition). By the time CommonMark came around, Markdown had already seen viral adoption; three of CommonMark's creators are from large companies that were already prominently using Markdown.

tl;dr I think the original Markdown spec and CommonMark are both significant contributions in their own right!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com