[mrottenkolber]

The best decision would be to drop Markdown from everything and pretend it never existed. Then design a similar format with a formal grammar, and use that.

The sad thing is this won't happen. Given the traction I suspect there will be broken, incompatible Markdown implementations 100 years from now. Markdown really has the potential to become the worst universally popular standard in computing history.

What bothers me is that its not one guy (Gruber) who made a mistake and designed a language without a formal grammar (hey, mistakes happen), its that armies of developers wrote broken parsers for a language without a formal grammar. This is an impossible task, why did they not refuse to create something fundamentally broken, by definition. Now there are apparently people who want to standardize Markdown, without a formal grammar. How can they not realize that it will be impossible to ever implement the standard? How do they not see that what they are doing is professionally unethical?

[jgord]

Nooo.. it just needs a proper formal grammar adopted, that captures the best of the common variants.

Then people can extend their tools to use that single variant and standard parser/grammar.

Most [good] languages were implemented first without a formal grammar - lex/yacc/bnf usually came later, if at all.

[stewbrew]

Markdown is quirk mode plain text. That was probably ok for its original purpose but it is not for what it is used nowadays. There are much better plain text like formats around and it's a shame markdown is in the position it is now. IMHO a well-defined subset of LaTeX (or context) with almost plain text markup for the 10 most commonly used commands would have been the better solution on the long run.