in the controversy around the release of commonmark, john gruber made it clear that his objection to the term 'standard markdown' was specifically that what he meant by 'markdown' was a specific syntax, not a loose family of formats; see https://nitter.lanterne-rouge.info/gruber/status/50765149869...
> @twangus @s_margheim @danielpunkass They’ve done more than “formalize”. They’ve changed the syntax. New syntax, new name. That’s all I ask.
you are of course free to use any word to mean whatever you like, however much it may annoy gruber; but consider that interpreting a word in a way at variance to the rest of the conversation will leave you, unnecessarily, wondering what the conversation is even about, as in this case
if you want to discuss what people should mean when they say 'markdown', please leave me out of that discussion, and please do not attempt to use it to imply that my words meant something i did not intend
it is true that markdown degrades gracefully, as does html. but graceful degradation is not the same thing as faithful preservation of archived documents
it would of course not make sense to write a parser for a loose family of file formats, but it makes perfect sense to write a parser for a file format. as discussed extensively in the funding documents for a project we recently worked on together, this is in fact an essential activity for the faithful preservation of archived documents in that format