Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by avgcorrection 1080 days ago
This is only perhaps correct in that a loosey-goosey proposals can spread farther because it is seemingly simple to implement (less MUST and whatever) and by the time you notice inconsistencies between implementations, the thing has reached a sort of critical mass already and the things aren’t that inconsistent so you just shrug and say whatever.

But in the case of MarkDown the original implementation was just not that great. Which has nothing to do with being easier; MacFarlane’s Djot is an easier to implement and easier to describe language.

And of course your point about “committee-driven pursuit of precision” is just a made up hypoethical which is not worth responding to. (The only committee has been on CommonMark, which is a definition of “MarkDown” (TM) which merely tries to deal with years of drift between different MarkDown implementations. With their famously long-winded spec-by-prose-enumeration style.)