| Title | Gruber and Winer Snipe at 'Common' Markdown Syntax Spec | |
| Date | Monday October 06 2014, @09:50AM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| from the markdown-dustup dept. | ||
Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood is leading a community-driven update to the syntax supported by Markdown, the plain text-to-HTML conversion utility developed in 2004 by John Gruber with help from the late Aaron Swartz. Markdown allows site users to compose simple constructs such as paragraphs, italics, boldface, unordered lists, and ordered lists, in their form posts, without inserting balky HTML tags; indeed, often without being aware that any conversion is being performed at all.
Gruber's perl script, Markdown.pl, was released 10 years ago under the BSD license, and has since been incorporated - and modified - by sites all over the web. Atwood became frustrated over the varying HTML output that different sites (using different forks or rewrites of the original Markdown script) produced from the same input text. Working with developers from GitHub, Reddit, and other sites, Atwood came up with a specification and test suite for a unified Markdown syntax; originally called 'Standard Markdown', Atwood changed the name to 'CommonMark' after Gruber objected.
Not everybody is thrilled by the new spec, though. The disagreements seem to have less to do with specifics of the unified syntax, than with the idea that a common syntax is being forced on web developers who were happy with what they had. The change in project name was not enough to mollify Gruber, who apparently suspects that his work is being hijacked by a consortium.
Internet scripting guru Dave Winer blogged in support of Gruber's position:
In [a Reddit] thread, a programmer laments that there is no formal grammar for Markdown. This was totally predictable. Once the format is in play, the extent to which theorists will want to debate it is almost boundless. By the time it's over, Markdown will be Lisp. Maybe that should be a corollary for Godwin's Law, except about format wars on the Internet.
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printed from SoylentNews, Gruber and Winer Snipe at 'Common' Markdown Syntax Spec on 2024-05-03 16:57:06