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It's enormously frustrating that there has been no standardization of the core base-level Markdown elements.

If you allow Markdown input you have to give a cheatsheet showing which "flavor" you are using.

That’s because Gruber shut down the effort to standardize markdown. He declined to participate and then demanded that “Standard Markdown” be shut down when it went public. This is what yielded CommonMark.

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

So we are left in the mode where markdown remains needlessly fractured. Different flavors that render slightly different and everyone gets a little annoyed but they deal with it ands occasionally bemoan the fact that there’s no standardization.

I've started to "standardize" my own use of Markdown as "whatever works in the apps I use". For me these apps are iA Writer, Obsidian, and Astro's rendering pipeline (which uses the Remark/Rehype ecosystem under the hood).

This sucks for sharing documents with other people, but in practice it's not a problem. 99% of my writing never leaves my notes app or blog. And when it does, I often export it to PDF or Word to make it easy for non-techie people to read (I love Pandoc for this, it's easily one of the favorite tools in my daily toolkit).

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