[mikl]

The only reason there isn’t an official Markdown spec is that John Gruber blocked the effort at creating one. A bunch of people made a great spec that eliminates all the ambiguities and tried to make it “Standard Markdown”.

Gruber then threatened them with legal action (since he holds the copyright on the word Markdown and for some reason hates proper specifications), so they had to rename their spec “CommonMark”.

Most of the big Markdown-using services (GitHub, GitLab, Reddit, Stack Overflow, etc.) implement this spec, so it is basically the Markdown spec, all but in name.

It can be found at https://spec.commonmark.org/

[nerdponx]

From what I remember, John McFarlane and his Pandoc project helped a lot in getting CommonMark adopted.

Github used to have its own "Github-flavored Markdown" before CommonMark came along.

[mikl]

Correct, he (jgm on GitHub) is still by far the biggest contributor to the spec: https://github.com/commonmark/commonmark-spec/graphs/contrib...

[blacktriangle]

I'm not a Gruber fan but I think his actions in this case are totally defensible. Every month on HN there's a post about some OSS project mod stepping down due to abuse and insane expectations from the community.

Gruber wrote a tool that solved his own personal problem, shared it with the world because why not, and then made damn sure he wasn't going to have to deal with any fallout put on him for his sharing.

[mikl]

Gruber did the exact opposite than stepping down. Even now, he insists on controlling the name “Markdown”, despite having abandoned the project over 15 years ago.

It would be a bit like Tim Berners-Lee trying to police how people use “WWW” today. He might theoretically be within his legal rights, but he’d still be a jerk for doing so.

[blacktriangle]

So then name it something else than Markdown? Gruber invented and published it, its fair that he gets to protect the name.

[mikl]

Renaming it would defeat the purpose of standardisation. Instead of unifying the language, it would create confusion among users who know what Markdown is but do not know “CommonMark” or vice versa.

And no, I do not think it fair or reasonable that whoever first coined a term gets to control its meaning forever. Especially when he just reused an existing dictionary word.

Basically, Gruber is asserting that because he came up with the concept, he gets to decide that no one can fix its flaws and clear up its ambiguities, and because the problems that stance causes to thousands of people do not affect him, we can all just kiss his self-righteous posterior.

[m-p-3]

Then let's stop referencing it as Markdown and let's all use the CommonMark name.

[mikl]

Ah yeah, try to educate millions of end-users about the new name, change the file extensions on 15 years worth of files, update reams of documentation, libraries and applications.

Does that sound even remotely feasible? I think not.

For better or worse, we’re stuck with the name, because trying to change it and failing would just create more compatibility problems and confusion.

Much like the eternal GIF pronunciation controversy or tabs vs. spaces, we’ll all just have to grin and bear it, because Gruber is not likely to change his mind.