What do you do when the founder of a project becomes an impediment to its progress? Gruber is clearly the creator and popularizer of Markdown. OTOH, he's been uninvolved in anything related to it for years (AFAICT).
The corollary to this question is to what degree the founder of a project "owns" aspects of the project (code, name, etc.) after they drop out. I'm not asking about legal ownership but rather moral ownership.
Look at the MySQL bifurcation. We don't have "MySQL++" by Percona and "MySQL Redux" by Monty — we have entirely new names. We don't see companies going around calling themselves "MySQL Labs" just to co-opt the good will of a pre-existing name. Oracle would sue the name infringers into the stoneage (temporal lawsuit warfare; very advanced move).
Now, I doubt teh groobz will lawyer up and smack down (unlike Oracle), but if you are creating something new using a pre-existing name just so you can exploit existing popularity you didn't create yourself... that's just a dick move.
Are Atwood et al. calling it "Standard Markdown" because they don't have enough of their own popularity, and feel the need to appropriate someone else's decade-old coolness in order to be recognized as significant people because they can't accomplish that in their own right?
Or are Atwood et al. calling it "Standard Markdown" because they know quite well that, given the massive proliferation of Markdown varieties all of which use the name "Markdown", naming it anything else essentially guarantees that because no one will ever hear of their effort, and therefore no developers will ever use their standardized variant, no matter how much less painful doing so would be for them and their users?
The words "Standard Markdown" sound like it is the standard from the owners of the Markdown. Also, from the "everything has happened before" mindset: https://twitter.com/peterseibel/status/507601508561457154
If they called it "Syntaxx, a flavor of Markdown that 9 organizations agree to support to enable text markup interop," that would be okay. Just like how "PerconaDB" is "PerconaDB, a mysql fork that's still protocol compatible with additional performance improvements."
If they called it "Syntaxx, [twenty more words that no one cares about]", no one will hear of it, and no one will use it. The words around "Markdown" might be negotiable; the presence of "Markdown" itself makes or breaks the viability of the project as a whole -- without that, Atwood et al. might as well not bother.
"Standard X" sounds a lot more to me to be "what a an interested committee did to X after it became popular and multiple different implementations of X existed, quite likely with only a distant, if any, connection to the creator of X".
I mean, if someone says "Standard Pascal" or "Standard SQL", or "Standard HTML", I don't assume it came from the inventors of those technologies.
Formalization of a grammar isn't "design by committee" (and in any case, this work in particular certainly was not). Formalization sets a logical, mathematical foundation for something that has thus far been a rather back-of-the-napkin, cowboy coded, cargo cult kind of thing. Could you name all the terminals before? I couldn't.
Markdown is implemented in hundreds of places (conservative guess). Discounting marked deviations and well-known dialects, it is a nontrivial task to ascertain whether a given Markdown implementation will produce the "correct output". What is correct output? Our ability to express or ascertain that is complicated by the fact that some rather archaic perl code [1] somehow holds the dubious distinction of being the de facto standard reference point for Markdown. Perhaps it was chosen as such on account of being the first mover, but probably its because nobody else had spoken up yet. (We're playing catch up now.)
"Implementation defines the standard" is a poor substitute for formality and is the result of intellectual laziness. (Hello PHP prior to HHVM.)
How did any of us effectively communicate what we thought correct meant? I feel a lot of our consensus was arrived at by enumerating all the examples and complex edge cases we could think of. (There's an idea that'll cover all the bases, yet it still maintains the niceties of being wonderfully concise!)
A formal grammar, as it turns out, is rather usually concise by nature (at least for the types of languages we care to design). To the attentive and deliberate thinker, a grammar's rules can be beautiful. A random mental walk through a complex repeating parse tree fills the mind all at once with intracate patterns and possibility. These are structures you can truly grok. With just pen and paper, or a standard text editor, you can easily define how the edges and vertices of an arbitrarily complex, infinite graph can connect. It's really kind of special, and definitely cerebral.
So now that we have a Markdown grammar to look to, libraries now have an easy model for attaining consensus agreement. Nobody is going to force anyone to change their current implementation or preference. If you like the one you've got, that's perfectly valid state to be in. If your only objection to the new formalization is because it was named the so-called "standard grammar," it's just a name. A silly old case of primate chest pounding, at that. Great ape problems.
Despite all the drama, this spec will probably not be the final end-all, be-all of 80 character wide expression. I can picture infinitely many such grammars, each one being just a little more absurdly named than its predecessor. Nothing is stopping you from forking "standard markdown" and calling it MarkyMark or something.
I still can't believe none of us ever noticed there wasn't a grammar for this. Especially given we communicated all of it through bloated Perl code shared from a zip file.
[1] https://github.com/rtomayko/shocco/blob/master/Markdown.pl
(Sorry for the non-canonical link; I'm on my phone. Google search results mention a downloadable on Gruber's site, but I could be wrong.)
Naming it something different is very simple. Really, very simple.
People are acting like Atwood and company are just trying to bring a little sanity to the project when it seems pretty clear (to me anyway) that it's really much closer to usurping the project entirely away from Gruber.
Further, he has dumped the project and appears to be completely uninterested in fixing, enhancing, or otherwise having much to do with it besides twitter spats.
In computing,"Standard X" almost never means "The One True X", it generally means "the variant of X that implementations claiming to support Standard X are at least making some gestures in the direction of supporting, but which many of them still won't completely and which, for many practical uses, you'll need to go beyond anyway in manners specific to your application and the particular implementation you are using."
So, these things happened:
- Gruber announces Markdown, and releases an implementation in Ruby and some basic documentation
- Someone ports Markdown to a different language. -> is it okay to call it Markdown?
- Said implementation differs from the original implementation in some minor ways, although it still matches the documentation (which is vague enough). This might not even be intentional; it wouldn't be the first time any software has had bugs. Or it might be intentional fixes of actual bugs in the original Ruby implementation of Markdown. -> is it okay to call it Markdown?
- Other people port Markdown to other languages. Said ports become more popular than the original Ruby implementation, such that pretty very few people who claim to use "Markdown" have actually used said original Ruby implementation. These ports are all subtly different from each other, although they still match the documentation (which is vague enough).
- A bunch of people decide to create better documentation (since said original documentation has been vague enough to cause problems with interoperability) -> is it okay to call it Markdown?
After answering these questions, I'd encourage you to replace "Markdown" with "HTML", and imagine how that originally went down.
Do you think NetScape should have claimed to support "NetScape-flavored HTML" rather than "HTML"? Do you think the WHATWG should have announced "WHATWG-flavored HTML" rather than "HTML5" in response to lack of action from the W3C (actually a very similar situation to what happened here).
However, I also question the success of this initiative had it been given another "flavor" name.
Edit: Not sure if this is the case after seeing this: https://twitter.com/gruber/status/507570504279293953
The canonical example would probably be the NetBSD/OpenBSD split (by Theo de Raadt) or the emacs/xemacs split. Or the vim/neovim split.