What people really want is for all Markdown implementations to be basically the same so they don't have to learn any implementation-specific ideosyncrasies to switch from one to another.
The problem though, as I see it, tends to go away under certain circumstances. And the circumstances, I think, are these:
* If you've got a strong implementation, robust, actively-maintained, and runs fast,
* is easy to obtain, install, and use,
* is well tested and well documented, and
* has just the right blend of sensible additions to the syntax (for example, tables, def lists, LaTeX math, etc.) --- done tastefully,
then folks will just use that, model their own implementations after that, and just overall start considering that to be the standard.
I think this has been slowly and steadily happening with Pandoc.
And, aside from all that, two additional "killer features" that Pandoc seems to have over other implementations:
1. it can convert to/from other doc markup formats, thus making it easy to just convert your existing docs to pandoc-markdown and then use that as your master source format to generate other formats you might need; and
2. with its carefully-chosen set of additional features, it has been slowly proving itself capable of being a replacement for raw LaTeX for certain types of longer technical documents.
My understanding is that there's even some features in the works (for the next release) for converting between markdown dialects --- which would make it even easier to convert markdown files of various flavors into plain standard pandoc-markdown.
So, if you're looking for a standard, I'd suggest that it's for the most part already here. :)
What people really want is for all Markdown implementations to be basically the same so they don't have to learn any implementation-specific ideosyncrasies to switch from one to another.
The problem though, as I see it, tends to go away under certain circumstances. And the circumstances, I think, are these:
* If you've got a strong implementation, robust, actively-maintained, and runs fast,
* is easy to obtain, install, and use,
* is well tested and well documented, and
* has just the right blend of sensible additions to the syntax (for example, tables, def lists, LaTeX math, etc.) --- done tastefully,
then folks will just use that, model their own implementations after that, and just overall start considering that to be the standard.
I think this has been slowly and steadily happening with Pandoc.
And, aside from all that, two additional "killer features" that Pandoc seems to have over other implementations:
1. it can convert to/from other doc markup formats, thus making it easy to just convert your existing docs to pandoc-markdown and then use that as your master source format to generate other formats you might need; and
2. with its carefully-chosen set of additional features, it has been slowly proving itself capable of being a replacement for raw LaTeX for certain types of longer technical documents.
My understanding is that there's even some features in the works (for the next release) for converting between markdown dialects --- which would make it even easier to convert markdown files of various flavors into plain standard pandoc-markdown.
So, if you're looking for a standard, I'd suggest that it's for the most part already here. :)