As long as any actual formal standard contains the term "markdown", John Gruber will find a way to torpedo it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8274870

https://blog.codinghorror.com/responsible-open-source-code-p...

https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...

https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/license

The standard answer to this is that there's too many variants.

I think it should be a thing anyway. If Blink, Webkit and Firefox have compatible implementations there can be some sort of de facto standard and it will be fine for a number of actually useful things, even if it's not perfectly defined to pocket protector standards.

Markdown does have a MIME type, as defined in RFC-7763 and RFC-7764. Markdown was rejected from Gemini for being too complex. "text/gemini" can be parsed line by line, which is why it was defined the way it was.

What if browsers had a default stylesheet that doesn't suck? The fact that twitter bootstrap had to exist at all should embarrass browser vendors. If people could write their html like motherfuckingwebsite and trust the browser to make it look decent, the web would be a much better place.