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Comment by janwillemb | Hacker News Reader

The writeup does not mention Jeff Atwood (Stackoverflow founder) trying to convince Gruber to standardize markdown. Atwood approached him publicly in a series of blog posts, but Gruber kept silent, and if I remember correctly finally declined stating that he didn't want to spend time jumping through other persons' hoops. Although it sucks that markdown is not standardized, I still see this as an inspiring example of a person just doing what he wants to do.

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It happened a bit differently; Atwood and friends simply came out with a standard document and called it "standard markdown", which Gruber then refused to endorse. Eventually after the series of blog posts and some back and forth they renamed the project "CommonMark", which it is still called today.

I am not sure (of course), but I think Atwood simply thought standardizing this format was so obviously valuable that he didn't consider Gruber might not want to work with him. In retrospect it's kind of nice that it didn't happen, it really keeps everyone incentivized to keep the format simple.

The linked post contains three cases of Markdown syntax (underscores) leaking into the text, where actual italics were likely intended. This is the most basic Markdown syntax element failing to work. The problem CommonMark is trying to solve is not adding new features (the only one they added to Gruber Markdown is fenced code blocks), but rather specifying how to interpret edge cases to ensure the same Markdown code produces the same HTML everywhere.

I understand the goal of the spec. In my experience once some spec document gets adapted widely enough, there's a strong incentive to add new features to it, which renderers would then be compelled to implement. Before you know it, MD is a complicated spec that doesn't serve its original purpose.

In this case a few minor edge cases is really not a big deal compared to that (in my opinion).

Here is a post from Atwood about it:

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

And an interesting discussion on hn about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4700383

> Although it sucks that markdown is not standardized

Does CommonMark count?

https://spec.commonmark.org/

No, that spec is the failed attempt to standardize by Atwood et al., that Gruber sabotaged.

Another take on that is that Gruber is unable to sabotage a markdown standard from coming to exist, no matter how much of a tantrum he wants to have. I have no interest in listening to him about the topic, he's just in the way of the community and everyone is routing around the damage.

What Gruber has done is forced the spec to be called CommonMark, but as far as everyone except Gruber is concerned CommonMark is the markdown spec.

There are flavors that predate it like GFM, and extensions, but IMHO going forward it's CommonMark + possibly your extensions or it's not really Markdown.

The lack of standardization has bitten me many times.

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