{"id":9502,"date":"2014-09-10T11:38:29","date_gmt":"2014-09-10T15:38:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=9502"},"modified":"2014-09-10T15:48:42","modified_gmt":"2014-09-10T19:48:42","slug":"markdown-and-commonmark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2014\/09\/10\/markdown-and-commonmark\/","title":{"rendered":"Markdown and CommonMark"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jeff Atwood<\/a> has been repeatedly trying to hijack<\/a> Markdown<\/a> rather than fork it. It’s hard to believe that he would think Common Markdown<\/a> would be acceptable when Standard Markdown<\/a> was not. Gruber clearly doesn’t want to give him the name, so this reads as Atwood increasingly trying to rationalize just taking it.<\/p>\n

Dave Winer<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Whatever his feelings for Gruber are, he’s hurting himself a lot more by taking the name of the project. It isn’t his to take. If he wants to make a contribution, let it stand on its own and accept competition from others.<\/p>

Gruber did the hard work, had the vision, and used his goodwill to get Markdown to happen. He can’t and shouldn’t stop anyone from building on what he did (and as far as I can tell he doesn’t want to), but they shouldn’t stop him either. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Winer (of course) sees parallels with RSS<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Now it is what it is. A bunch of programmers fighting over who gets to be the Holy Father of Markdown is only going to create confusion, it won’t actually change what Markdown is<\/em>.<\/p>

Programmers always underestimate deployment, and think they can wave a magic wand and get everyone to upgrade.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Werner Vogels<\/a>:<\/p>\n

It is a case of “Worse is better” - instead of excellent formalized frameworks we favor tools that work. Help us (in this case writers) do our jobs. My two favorite tools in this case (e.g. Textmate and Byword) seem to be fine with the definition as is and as such I don’t see reason to resort to an standardization effort.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think it’s great that people have been able to extend Markdown in different ways, for different purposes, even creating domain-specific derivatives<\/a>. However, the argument that it’s good<\/em> for the basic features to remain<\/em> underspecified has never been clear to me. Today, people wouldn’t say that about HTML and the Web, so why should Markdown be different? How is it more user-friendly to the writer to get different output from different tools?<\/p>\n

So I think the formalization effort is a good thing, and (given Gruber’s wishes) that it’s also good for it to proceed under a different name, CommonMark<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Because there is no unambiguous spec, implementations have diverged considerably. As a result, users are often surprised to find that a document that renders one way on one system (say, a GitHub wiki) renders differently on another (say, converting to docbook using Pandoc). To make matters worse, because nothing in Markdown counts as a “syntax error,” the divergence often isn’t discovered right away.<\/p><\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeff Atwood has been repeatedly trying to hijack Markdown rather than fork it. It’s hard to believe that he would think Common Markdown would be acceptable when Standard Markdown was not. Gruber clearly doesn’t want to give him the name, so this reads as Atwood increasingly trying to rationalize just taking it. Dave Winer: Whatever […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[990,337,991],"class_list":["post-9502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-commonmark","tag-markdown","tag-open-source-software"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9502"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9546,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9502\/revisions\/9546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}