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It is used almost entirely with gfm, the operation of gfm was in consultation. it was in this connection that the commonmark specification was formulated.

Seven years ago? Who cares?

> Maybe 5 people and their friends use Pandoc

The pandoc repository[1] has nearly 45k stars and 4k forks. It's embedded in Jupyter notebooks, which are used by data scientists the world over. The python wrapper for pandoc has 16 million downloads[2].

[1]: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc [2]: https://pypi.org/project/pandoc/

Great, but Jupyter notebooks aren’t written in Markdown.

Next?

They are, though. [1]

But maybe that's insufficient. Hugo[2], one of the most widespread static site generators in existence, supports Pandoc markdown flavors as well as general GFM.[3]

[1]: https://jupyter-notebook.readthedocs.io/en/stable/examples/N...

[2]: https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo

[3]: https://gohugo.io/content-management/formats/

They are not supported by GitHub’s GFM, and you are being incredibly bad faith about this fact.

If you are comfortable calling Markdown a futile exercise in avoiding proprietary control of a universal, simple document format for wide interoperability across natural languages, programming languages, and monopoly interests, then you and I are Microsoft vs Sun over Java in the 1990s.

The original Gruber-Shwartz format, which is in fact fundamentally a perl program attached to a brief expression of its intention, is not used by anyone except those who still use the perl program. Every other implementation avoids thousands of corner cases present in the perl, while of course producing its own.

Boring, useless content. You must love the sound of your own voice when you read back the nonsequiturs you have offered in this comment section.

If it really was this simple GitHub would have publicized this spec instead of being intentionally vague and opaque about it.

But you know what’s best.

The spec is the commonmark spec together with extensions of the type the commonmark spec was devised to make possible. People know better than to leave such a 'language' with a 'spec' that only really resides in a perl program, of all things. There are lists upon lists upon lists of corner cases the the perl does differently from every other program that, in the first years, reimplemented it. All of them show the perl does not meet the intention.

You are such a bore. Read the motivating preamble in Gruber's spec- that's the part the GFM standardization process stayed faithful to.

Up until Microsoft got involved.

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