There was an obvious, demonstrable need out there for implementation consistency. Gruber didn't step up to help resolve confusions, so he has no right to complain when other people do the hard work.
I hear this sentiment a lot but I just find it unconvincing.
Over the past decade, Markdown became the lingua franca for transforming plain text to HTML. It did this entirely on the back of Gruber's spec, implementation, and the community that developed around the project. It hasn't had a formal spec this entire time and it's done just fine.
Are there some undefined behaviors in the original spec? Sure. But it was just designed to handle the most common situations, not everything.
Reading Atwoods issues with original Markdown[1] (which is significant given his extensive experience in products that rely heavily on Markdown), it is quite clear that Markdown as a format has prospered almost in spite of the original specification.
They could have called it any number of other things that don't make the same claims that "Standard Markdown" does. Off the top of my head; Common Markdown, Clean Markdown, or better yet don't actually use the Markdown name, simply imply it such as Forkdown or Sporkdown.
It would be best if the team would just go another route entirely.
To be honest, I think this industry wide devotion to Markdown is hilarious, since to me it's a pretty garbage way of solving an easily solved problem. The main/only thing in its favor is its ubiquity.
Whatever you may think of Markdown (that is markdown as created by Gruber), it surely isn't unreasonable to suggest that if any version can make that sort of claim, it should be the original.
Out of curiosity, what do you think is the better "easy" solution to the problem Markdown is trying to solve?
(btw I'm in the camp that thinks "Standard Markdown" is just fine, though I do hope they get the formal specs nailed down a bit more solidly on the ambiguities discussed upthreads, preferably with some kind of formal grammar)
Imagine if you forked GTK and named it "Official GTK" and then blamed GTK for not doing what you wanted them to, so its obviously their fault that you needed to steal their name.
Standard Markdown is just that, it's Markdown but standardized. It's exactly the right name given what it does.
Some names are descriptive, some are prescriptive. Just deal with it.
Yeah, it was a slightly different situation, but still, there was a name collision and in the end nothing was ever done about it.
Google didn't appropriate the syntax or standard for the original Go, they just used the same (extremely common) two letter word.
And I don't really see the problem there, there are a multitude of hobby and dead languages with names that may be duplicated in the future.
And I don't really see the problem there
And that is the problem. People don't care about somebody just coming along and arbitrarily usurping a name somebody else is already using. Of course they may see it differently one day when the shoe is on the other foot. But for now, there seems to be a trend where people don't care about resolving name collisions... and even more so if they're a rich entity like Google or Apple.
Some background here for those interested: http://daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=6563
The resulting legal battle came to be known as "the UNIX wars", and resulted in a legal finding that AT&T had little to no effective copyright ownership of the BSD codebase (a few minor files IIRC). This decision was issued under seal, later broken in the subsequent SCO vs. IBM lawsuit of the early 2000s.
The contretemps has been argued as among the reasons Linux emerged and became as popular as it is: it was a de novo, fully independent, largely POSIX-compliant reimplementation of the UNIX environment that was good enough for those who wanted that sort of thing.
That'd totally suck, wouldn't it?
Honestly, I'm of the opinion that they can call it Standard Markdown if they want to and there's nothing wrong with that. Gruber's opinion is worth something for sure because of his authorship of the original, but there's a statute of limitations. He doesn't think Markdown needs anything more than his Perl script, but the rest of the internet has disagreed pretty strongly for long enough now that it's fine to treat him as absentee.
I don't really see this as a valid comparison to what the folks behind "Standard Markdown" are doing. I agree with others that the Standard Markdown name was a poor choice. For me at least, it feels like they are saying "We're taking over now". I don't know if that indeed was their intent, but that's the way it comes across to me. I think they should choose a different name.
For the record, I really don't have any skin in the game here, as the controversy doesn't really affect me much.
Which the "non-profit national standards committee" is just a collection of folks representing firms in the industries to which the standards apply.