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Comment by johnsea | Hacker News Reader

Markdown is a mess. Gruber refuses to take care and now there are a ton of slightly different dialects because the original draft is clearly lacking in some respects.

Just last week wanted to use GFM, they introduced a new newline style. Or maybe not? In gollum it doesn't seem to be working and then there are breaking lines with two spaces. Or not? It's a desaster.

Some group should take over the markdown format definition.

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It's a shame Carl Sassenrath's MakeDoc didn't catch on (outside of the Rebol world at least).

NB. MakeDoc was already 4 years old when Markdown was born.

ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakeDoc

That's interesting. Considering the similarity, I wonder if Markdown was influenced in part or whole by MakeDoc.

Go for it. You could call it Topdown.

Or Markup. Oh wait.

;-) But why not 'just steal' the markdown name? Afaik Gruber used the name for a software and not for a standard... A committee (codehorror, Github, marked, discount, Pandoc people etc.) could e.g. buy the markdown.org domain and start publishing new standards. I'd love to have a core which is the ~same what we have now and then extensions. The core could (very slightly) develop if necessary.

It's not nice to take over names but why not? It's a pity to see Markdown rotting along since years :-(

I'm not good enough. It would need people who know more about specifications, parsing and have influence.

But if I would go for it, I would call it 'Markdown' and try to redefine it, hehe.

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