

Ask HN: The Markdown mess. Where to now for plain text formatting syntax? - hoodoof

Jeff Atwood et al recently attempted to come up with a better defined standard for Markdown.<p>The original author, John Gruber, took exception to this for whatever reason, ultimately forcing Atwood and his associates to entirely remove the &quot;Markdown&quot; name from their effort to standardise&#x2F;improve.  This can&#x27;t have been good for what is now called &quot;CommonMark&quot;, ultimately now a spiritual successor to Markdown, but now lacking close association with the original.<p>So where to now for plain text formatting syntax? Things now appear more fragmented than ever.
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brudgers
Atwood has been working on the issues with markdown since the early days of
StackOverflow [2008]. He began looking at a new parser as early as 2010. The
folks at Github have been likewise working around the problems inherent in
Gruber's definition. Many of these are due to his definition not being based
on a context free grammar and become important at the scale of sites like
StackOverflow and Github.

Is the world fragmented? Hardly. There's less difference between CommonMark
Markdown and Gruber's Classic Markdown than between the 31 flavors of regular
expressions that programmers deal with every day.

Why didn't Gruber just set Markdown free? Well you'd have to ask him. My
suspicion is that Github drives traffic to his web properties by linking to
his documentation as the canonical source. Atwood being a Microsoft developer
probably doesn't sit well either.

But in the long run, it won't matter any more than Larry Wall not getting Ken
Thompson's blessing when he wrote Perl's regular expression engine. People
will use what works, and if CommonMark Markdown works better than Gruber
Markdown, then that's what will stick.

~~~
hoodoof
Jeff Atwood's Discourse is Ruby On Rails - I don't think he's committed to
Microsoft exclusively.

~~~
brudgers
Yeah, that's true. Then again, his reason is the priority he placed on open-
source, and the licensing is more complex on the MicroSoft stack.

[http://blog.codinghorror.com/why-ruby/](http://blog.codinghorror.com/why-
ruby/)

------
GuiA
Just do what works for you (use Gruber's spec if it solves your problem, use
Common Markdown if it solves your problem, use your own hand rolled solution
if it solves your problem), and ignore the noise. Natural selection will do
its thing.

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dragonwriter
As before the recent brouhaha, AsciiDoc.

