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Comment by redbad | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who thinks Jeff Atwood is completely without the necessary credibility to spearhead an effort like this?

To say nothing of the time-tested idiocy of designing a spec by committee? IEEE telco protocols being the canonical example?

The whole effort seems like a terrible idea. Gruber's responses seem to me to be completely appropriate.

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Am I the only one who thinks Jeff Atwood is completely without the necessary credibility to spearhead an effort like this?

That's how things get done. People get credibility by standing up, leading, and getting things done in the way Atwood does. He didn't have the "credibility" to partner with Joel Spolsky and create Stack Overflow either but I'm glad Joel didn't see it that way.

Actually, he lost credibility for not being a decent human being and e-mailing John Gruber first and StackOverflow is really irrelevant here.

"Say, so-and-so, you wrote a really nice book but there are several errors in the first edition. We think it's great and we love it, and we see the potential in your work, so we're going to rewrite a second edition by committee then sell it under your title and byline without your permission; that cool with you?"

This seems like a strawman. You can't fairly compare a language to a book. A book isn't used universally to make other completely unrelated books.

If Markdown had continued to be robustly maintained by Gruber then I would give that thought more credence. As it is now it's barely just one notch shy of abandonware, I think that transfers Gruber's feelings from the realm of reasonable criticism to the land of butthurt.

Yep. Nuances of etiquette are one thing but I'll always side with the person that is trying to move things forward over the person that is throwing up hurdles.

To my way of thinking, Gruber comes out of this looking churlish and unhelpful at best.

The more pertinent question is why Jeff didn't make more effort to base this off one of the existing standardisation efforts.

The problem is that the existing spec is something one guy wrote up years ago, and there are edge cases that aren't handled. There is also a buggy implementation from the same guy, also from years ago, that sets behavior for those edge cases, but also does stuff that isn't in the spec. So if you want to write "MarkDown", do you write to the spec or to the implementation or what? And Gruber's response is "I'm happy with it as it is", which isn't even an answer to the question.

Are there a lot of things that have been standardized without a committee being involved? I'm not aware of many. Designed, yes. Standardized, no.

Standardization by definition requires a buy-in of major players.

Nevertheless, TeX might qualify as standard without commmittee.

A very messy one, though. With not that many alternative implementations (iirc they all are based on the converted-to-C Pascal code).

All major implementations (miktex, pdftex, xetex, luatex) are derivatives of Knuth's Pascal code.

There are others, but they did not get very far: http://kasper.phi-sci.com/tex++/ http://www.cucug.org/amiga/amiinfo/reviews/AmigaTeX.txt

JSON, sort of. Crockford humorously says he is a standards body because of that.

Crockford also developed a standard for JSON [1] and actively participates in maintaining it. [2]

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4627

[2] https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js/commits/master

> Am I the only one who thinks Jeff Atwood is completely without the necessary credibility to spearhead an effort like this?

I don't think he'll be spearheading it by the end, for whatever thats worth.

So you think the only problem with this turning into personality-based drama is that it's the wrong personalities?

It seems to me that most good specs started out as individual efforts, then once they reached a certain level of maturity and usefulness, got taken over by a committee to polish into a proper standard. For example, C and UNIX. And this is exactly the path that Markdown will end up following, if this effort is successful.

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