Using (basically) the same name strikes me as somewhat hostile given the views Gruber has expressed, and likely to cause confusion to end users.
Because it communicates the right thing to users >90% of the time. If you learn the language specified here and then go write some reddit comments or file a GitHub issue using that language, it will do what you expect.
The few places where it doesn't you probably don't have an intuition about anyway.
If you treat "markdown" as an improper word describing the language and not some sort of proper "brand name" that describes provenance, then what they describe here is "markdown".
It would do the same thing if all those groups (since they seem to be onboard) had decided to call it TextMark or CommentAscii or some other new term. As long as they all use the same term it would be fine.
But instead they're basically trying to strong-arm redefine Gruber's name, and they'll win because they're bigger.
It's in terribly poor taste.
This will actually make things worse too, because they've invented another standard. People will see 'old' Markdown sites that don't work like 'new' Markdown sites ('Standard' is too subtle) and ascribe it to a bug in 'new' Markdown.
They haven't avoided confusion in the way a new name would have done very quickly.
Same confusion, acting like a jerk to take over someone else's creation. High class there.
IANAL.
I would avoid this wording. I would instead say:
It's a flavor of markdown. The flavor is heavily documented. The flavor's name is "Standard Markdown".
My problem with the name "Standard Markdown" is I don't think it's going to be clear enough, I think people will think it's the same thing as Markdown (which it's not), under the theory that "non-standard" would have an obviously different name such as "Lisp Markdown" or "Japanese Markdown".
If they had used a word other than "Markdown" I wouldn't have a single problem, I would cheer them on.
I don't see a real benefit in this name to anyone, but I see serious downsides.
That's certainly an unbiased translation :rolls eyes:. If you want to have a good-faith debate, you should avoid tendentious re-writes of your interlocutor's arguments.
You clearly don't like his position.
Be he has explicitly chosen not to make a specification, he's had years and numerous requests. From what I've seen/heard John Gruber likes that it isn't formalized with a spec.
So if a group of people, especially a large group with 10s of millions of users (at a minimum) decides to write a spec and name it "Markdown" over Gruber's wishes it sounds like trying to take ownership from him.
My phrase was glib, but I don't think it's that far off from many of the comments expressed here.
The reasons that he didn't write a spec after requests is very likely post-hoc rationalisation, behind the simple reason that writing a spec is not a fun task.
As I read it, if you want your Markdown documents to be rendered a specific way, you choose/configure/write a Markdown parser that renders it that way (possibly with the assistance of an additional stylesheet). If you need a particular extension for a task (tables, syntax-highlighted code blocks) you can use an parser that supports them. And if you need specific HTML elements, you can use them inline.
The way I read it, Markdown is intended as an _input format for markup tools_, designed to be both legible and meaningful as plain text. Any meaning that can't be explicitly encoded in the ASCII format, including the specific HTML tags used to render a given construct, is outside Markdown's scope and should probably be stored in a more structured format.