I'd feel a lot better about Markdown if it had an actual spec apart from a pile of perl regexes and a maintainer that hadn't abandoned it. I still use it because it's the lowest-common-denominator, but I have a hard time feeling good about it.
I disagree. I was one of the “six active users” of Infogami before it was shuttered, so perhaps I have a unique perspective…
If Markdown were just a single language, then sure, it’d be nice to have a more precise specification, and a cleaner Word-of-God implementation. But with all the slightly different implementations that now exist, Markdown has become less a language and more a language family. It’s just not useful to talk about standardisation, because it isn’t possible now, and we can’t go back to 2005 when it might’ve been.
Besides, the Daring Fireball implementation is hairy only because it’s designed to “just work”. The handling of “special” cases is the very thing that made the original Markdown so user-friendly and tolerant to variation. That is what Markdown is all about, and why it has become so popular in the first place.
More than a language, it’s a culture—a culture of getting things done without worrying about all the details of formatting. And that, I think, is the point of the article.
I agree with you. Markdown is meant to be very straightforward and simple, especially since it can be augmented with HTML. MultiMarkdown[1] and GFM[2] exist as variants of Markdown that can do much more, for those who want more... and I'm sure there are other flavors.
