There was an obvious, demonstrable need out there for implementation consistency. Gruber didn't step up to help resolve confusions, so he has no right to complain when other people do the hard work.
> There was an obvious, demonstrable need out there for implementation consistency.
I hear this sentiment a lot but I just find it unconvincing.
Over the past decade, Markdown became the lingua franca for transforming plain text to HTML. It did this entirely on the back of Gruber's spec, implementation, and the community that developed around the project. It hasn't had a formal spec this entire time and it's done just fine.
Are there some undefined behaviors in the original spec? Sure. But it was just designed to handle the most common situations, not everything.
While Markdown is certainly used widely and is based on Grubers original specification, the practical real-world usage is a lot more complicated that just relying on the original specification.
Reading Atwoods issues with original Markdown[1] (which is significant given his extensive experience in products that rely heavily on Markdown), it is quite clear that Markdown as a format has prospered almost in spite of the original specification.
That's an argument in favor of them making a spec, not an argument in favor of them using the name "Standard Markdown."
They could have called it any number of other things that don't make the same claims that "Standard Markdown" does. Off the top of my head; Common Markdown, Clean Markdown, or better yet don't actually use the Markdown name, simply imply it such as Forkdown or Sporkdown.
That doesn't really address the main objection to the name "Standard Markdown" unless you already know what the problem with the name is (and thus the implications of the slight difference.)
It would be best if the team would just go another route entirely.
To be honest, I think this industry wide devotion to Markdown is hilarious, since to me it's a pretty garbage way of solving an easily solved problem. The main/only thing in its favor is its ubiquity.
What percentage of all Markdown written is on GitHub, Reddit, or Stack Exchange? What percentage of rendered Markdown served to users is from those sites? Tough to estimate, but I would say it's certainly a majority. Surely any flavor of Markdown agreed upon by those sites can make a pretty strong case to be considered "standard."
Out of curiosity, what do you think is the better "easy" solution to the problem Markdown is trying to solve?
Standard implies "normal" or "default" as well as "standardised".
Whatever you may think of Markdown (that is markdown as created by Gruber), it surely isn't unreasonable to suggest that if any version can make that sort of claim, it should be the original.
How would "Common Markdown" be any better than "Standard Markdown"? Doesn't it sort of imply the same thing?
(btw I'm in the camp that thinks "Standard Markdown" is just fine, though I do hope they get the formal specs nailed down a bit more solidly on the ambiguities discussed upthreads, preferably with some kind of formal grammar)
Well taking something someone else created and rereleasing it using relatively the same name while insinuating it's the official or standard version is what's known in the industry as a dick move.
Imagine if you forked GTK and named it "Official GTK" and then blamed GTK for not doing what you wanted them to, so its obviously their fault that you needed to steal their name.
Imagine if you took a look at all the incompatible implementations of 1970's and 1980's C and blamed them for not being compatible, and created a fork called "ANSI C".
Generally with language standards though, the major players involved are all part of the standardization process. A slightly different example might be Microsoft developing an incompatible version of Java and calling it Java (until they got smacked into calling it J++ instead).
Honestly, I'm of the opinion that they can call it Standard Markdown if they want to and there's nothing wrong with that. Gruber's opinion is worth something for sure because of his authorship of the original, but there's a statute of limitations. He doesn't think Markdown needs anything more than his Perl script, but the rest of the internet has disagreed pretty strongly for long enough now that it's fine to treat him as absentee.
I realize that the "S" in ANSI stands for "Standards", but I think it is obvious to anyone who cares that the things which come from ANSI are produced by a non-profit national standards committee ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_National_Standards_Ins... ). As the Wikipedia page says, ANSI "oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel".
I don't really see this as a valid comparison to what the folks behind "Standard Markdown" are doing. I agree with others that the Standard Markdown name was a poor choice. For me at least, it feels like they are saying "We're taking over now". I don't know if that indeed was their intent, but that's the way it comes across to me. I think they should choose a different name.
For the record, I really don't have any skin in the game here, as the controversy doesn't really affect me much.
And for those who don't follow links: this was the phone number advertised by BSD Unix, a fork of AT&T's Unix, when BSD launched its own commercial distribution.
The resulting legal battle came to be known as "the UNIX wars", and resulted in a legal finding that AT&T had little to no effective copyright ownership of the BSD codebase (a few minor files IIRC). This decision was issued under seal, later broken in the subsequent SCO vs. IBM lawsuit of the early 2000s.
The contretemps has been argued as among the reasons Linux emerged and became as popular as it is: it was a de novo, fully independent, largely POSIX-compliant reimplementation of the UNIX environment that was good enough for those who wanted that sort of thing.
It is kind of a dick move, and sadly this sort of thing (specifically, not respecting existing name usage) appears to be becoming more and more common. And sadly outrage from the community seems to be ineffective at preventing this stuff. Look at Google pilfering the name "Go" for their new programming language[1].
Yeah, it was a slightly different situation, but still, there was a name collision and in the end nothing was ever done about it.
I don't see how you can not see that the two situations are similar. Note: similar, not identical. Google stole a name that was already being used in the exact same domain (programming language). Nobody said they borrowed the same syntax or anything, that isn't the point.
And I don't really see the problem there
And that is the problem. People don't care about somebody just coming along and arbitrarily usurping a name somebody else is already using. Of course they may see it differently one day when the shoe is on the other foot. But for now, there seems to be a trend where people don't care about resolving name collisions... and even more so if they're a rich entity like Google or Apple.
"Standard" carries with it a significant heft in meaning, especially authority, that "Something" else is unlikely to carry. Authority that is illegitimate without the original author's involvement.
