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Comment by personZ | Hacker News Reader

Why not just do something completely original and get away from this mess?

And by original, I include the concept of using traditional ASCII markups. For instance, doing this (asterisks) for emphasis long preceded Markdown. As did _this_. As did -this- and various other ASCII markings. None of those are innovations of markdown, or are they inventions of John Gruber, and their intention is directly paralleled in HTML.

Beyond that...the link mechanism of Markdown is and always has been pretty weak, and outside of that it's pretty marginal grounds.

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What's weak about [link text](http://example.com/foobar.html)? It's succinct to type and store, and human-readable as plain text to boot.

Markdown's kind of taking over from BBCode as a standard for non-html markup, especially as used in comment boxes. [Gruber's original post](http://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-flavored-markdown/) notes that the working group for Markdown II: The Markdownening included people from Github, StackExchange, and Reddit, which all use Markdown for formatting their comments.

So, would you rather standardize what's emerged as the standard, and have umpty-million comment boxes keep on working pretty much the same, or make Yet Another Standard that may indeed be superior but is used nowhere?

(Admittedly if the sites involved in this decided to switch to New Lightweight Markup Language at once they'd probably change the habits of a ton of people pretty quicky.)

> [Gruber's original post]

You mean Atwood's.

Do you really think it is appropriate, or polite, to ask "Why not just do something completely different to what you've been working on for over two years"?

Yes, I do think it's appropriate. Further, this discussion is among the participants of HN -- it isn't for the edification or entertainment of any subjects.

There's a name and namespace collision that is causing enormous ill will. Further, as much as it's a "standard" it's a half-baked standard on most sites, many simply utilizing what people already traditionally did for ASCII decoration.

It doesn't need to be called "Markdown" to justify what they've invested their time in over the last few years. Changing to a non-Markdown name doesn't invalidate their 2-year effort of creating a spec, unit tests and implementation of a human-readable text format that can be rendered as HTML. A name change doesn't change the fundamental and substantial part of their work.

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