[janwillemb]

The writeup does not mention Jeff Atwood (Stackoverflow founder) trying to convince Gruber to standardize markdown. Atwood approached him publicly in a series of blog posts, but Gruber kept silent, and if I remember correctly finally declined stating that he didn't want to spend time jumping through other persons' hoops. Although it sucks that markdown is not standardized, I still see this as an inspiring example of a person just doing what he wants to do.

[awesan]

It happened a bit differently; Atwood and friends simply came out with a standard document and called it "standard markdown", which Gruber then refused to endorse. Eventually after the series of blog posts and some back and forth they renamed the project "CommonMark", which it is still called today.

I am not sure (of course), but I think Atwood simply thought standardizing this format was so obviously valuable that he didn't consider Gruber might not want to work with him. In retrospect it's kind of nice that it didn't happen, it really keeps everyone incentivized to keep the format simple.

[Kwpolska]

The linked post contains three cases of Markdown syntax (underscores) leaking into the text, where actual italics were likely intended. This is the most basic Markdown syntax element failing to work. The problem CommonMark is trying to solve is not adding new features (the only one they added to Gruber Markdown is fenced code blocks), but rather specifying how to interpret edge cases to ensure the same Markdown code produces the same HTML everywhere.

[janwillemb]

Here is a post from Atwood about it:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...

And an interesting discussion on hn about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4700383

[thangalin]

> Although it sucks that markdown is not standardized

Does CommonMark count?

https://spec.commonmark.org/

[janwillemb]

No, that spec is the failed attempt to standardize by Atwood et al., that Gruber sabotaged.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

The lack of standardization has bitten me many times.