This does a fine job of address Jeff Atwood's criticisms of Markdown. Yay for GitHub stepping up where Markdown's author isn't.
This also vindicates the "OSS authors don't owe nobody nothing!" crowd, as GitHub steps up and fixes the problems in question without requiring any participation by the original author of Markdown.
Aye. Seems like this was submitted in response to the dead post calling out Atwood.
The two months since Github forked Markdown suggests to me Markdown isn't at critical mass, ergo Atwood's stewardship criticism seems misplaced. If he argued it could become _something_ beyond a better humane markup than those in the know, then he has a more valid criticism, and picking a fight. Seems underhanded to me.
Best I know, Gruber didn't intend for it to become something. It has only because it is more humane than most, and yet, it is pales in adoption compared the dearth of Word toolbar knockoffs.
The problem is that Markdown is far past critical mass, and is well into denouement. Everybody has the same major issues with its design, and are dissolutioned by the same outright bugs in Gruber's crap implementation. It doesn't help that the language is designed to be implemented as a regex substitution shitpile, as Gruber doesn't know the first thing about grammars.
He's been sitting on a pile of bugfixes for years that he refuses to release under his imprimatur. He hasn't blessed or even mentioned any of the dozen superior reimplementations of his spec. A few months ago he mentioned that he likes the idea behind Github's behavior-modifying patch for RDiscount, but not for his own use.
He really needs to post a new version of Markdown.pl with a disclaimer about its poor quality, and explicitly bless several of the reimplementations for actual use.
In one day on news.yc, I've seen two Markdown critiques, which is two more than I've seen, ever. This is a new development to a Markdown user. Please note the bugfixes he sat on.
And why this needs to be argued anymore: The BSD license gives you freedom. DVCS is about politics. Do what you need to do. If they don't like what you've done, fuck 'em you've voted in code, theory and premise.
Some Outright Bugs in Markdown.pl simply described with examples: http://code.google.com/p/pandoc/wiki/PandocVsMarkdownPl -- He doesn't even mention the hilarity where if you mention the MD5 hash of a token in the document, the hash will be replaced with the token, as Gruber's code uses that as an escaping mechanism!
"PHP Markdown" started as a straight transliteration of Markdown.pl, and he lists 123 user-visible changes that he made. The few of those changes that add features were to deal with warts in Markdown's design that made it impossible to not fuck things up: http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
The BSD license does gives you freedom, but not authority or the name, and Gruber spent years being hostile towards forkers/reimplementors, and then spent years simply ignoring it. Besides, the only thing the license would give your freedom regarding is Gruber's code, and you really don't want that.
I'm not sure about the 'newline-is-linebreak' idea. I can see how for user-submitted content it's there for people that have never used Markdown before, but I like to wrap my text to 80-characters when I'm composing so that it's not stretched across the screen.
I do this because I don't know of any way in vim to set a 'soft word wrap' so that lines are soft-wrapped at a specific column instead of just at the max width of the buffer. (Creating a fake vertical split is not what I want.)
I do the same thing. Markdown lets you do this already, you just have to have two spaces at the end of each line.
One thing that I feel like Markdown is sorely missing is the ability to link to anchors within the same document. It would be nice if each heading had its own anchor tag.
Yeah, anchors would be great. They aren't really any different from a hyperlink, they are hyperlinks fare and square, they just refer to the same document. If only there was a way to refer to `self` in Markdown…
If you were to take the GFM that was implemented on top of showdown and use it for something like a wiki (ala stackoverflow's wiki-fication of questions), then currently you have XSS holes.
This also vindicates the "OSS authors don't owe nobody nothing!" crowd, as GitHub steps up and fixes the problems in question without requiring any participation by the original author of Markdown.