EDIT: To be really classy, after the rename, redirect standardmarkdown.com to Gruber's Markdown home page.
Remember Hudson? Maybe you've heard of Jenkins? Exactly.
All the big players who make use of Markdown are on board with this. If they all adopt this "standard" whatever it's called, it will effectively spell the end of mass usage of "Markdown" as it stands now.
That's why this keruffle is so stupid. Then again, renaming will take away the attention from the stupid yelling over the name, so maybe they should just do it and deprive them of it. Call it Sparkdown or Harkdown or something so the connection is still apparent and move on.
I doubt that. RSS is still widely used even though Atom has the more precise specification.
> Call it Sparkdown or Harkdown or something so the connection is still apparent and move on.
FWIW, Gruber has explicitly endorsed this approach: https://twitter.com/gruber/status/507590561172176897
And while I'm aware he wants them to do their thing with a new name (an argument I can agree with for sure), I think he'd probably still complain about a connective name (e.g., Sparkdown). I don't know for sure, but given his posture to this whole thing throughout the process, it seems likely. At that point, though, I think they could justifiably just give him the proverbial finger. :)
EDIT: Turns out I was wrong. He gave them a list of similar names (with Markdown in them no less!) in a recent e-mail.
Except when "X" is legally a trademark, its not uncommon for "Standard X" to be defined by an entity independent of the creator "X" without needing approval from the creator of "X".
Where "X" is a trademark (e.g., "JavaScript"), things are a little different, but I don't see a convincing argument that Markdown is Gruber's trademark.
And he utterly refuses to do anything to actually improve the clarity of the original document and make it easier and more obvious to determine how parsers should behave.
> Atwood and company should just rename their spec and be done with it.
It's kind of upsetting that they didn't. If they'd chosen another name, there'd have been no controversy.