Is there a canonical Markdown specification now? A machine readable grammar? Last I looked, Markdown was a bunch of almost-compatible interpretations based on lore and opinion.
They mention CommonMark as a popular specification
One of the issues is that original Markdown used tabs everywhere, but people started using spaces, but some implementations choke down on them.
The biggest issue in Markdown is that whitespace is significant and important; and there are tons of weird edgecases of all the various rules clashing with each other.
Even CommonMark has some weird unspecified edgecases.
I was briefly involved with a Markdown parser implementation… it’s really really hard to parse MarkDown. Not sure if harder than to parse HTML, as I did not do that. But it’s still really really hard.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...
It also sounds like he ignored an invitation to join the effort to create what became CommonMark.
Since that was as close as anyone came to standardizing, ya it seems reasonable to conclude he’s fine with the ambiguities.
Gruber got irritated by even attempting to get his opinion on this effort. Very, very weird.
Markdown is great for a simple readme, but once you start needing larger more structured docs, or want output formats other than HTML, it just falls down.
Oh? These are written in Markdown and typeset using ConTeXt:
* https://pdfhost.io/v/4FeAGGasj_SepiSolar_Highlevel_Software_... (see 9.9.1)
* https://www.docdroid.net/eGHQ6O7/autonoma-pdf (see emojis and speech bubbles in chapter 2)
* https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf (99% pure Markdown)
* https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/28/typesetting-markdow... (technically XHTML, but can be converted)
But even when writing my last paper I used Markdown (+pandoc) because I had a coauthor and Github et al. have made it more familiar to so many more people. Maybe in niches like the Python community but it's a distinctly minority option, at least where I've worked.
You'll still find Markdown implementations with a "don't care" attitude, but if an implementation targets any specification at all it's going to be CommonMark, a superset of it, or (more rarely) a subset of it.