Comment by Analemma_
2 days ago
This is a good article, although I wish it had talked a little more about the standardization (or rather, the lack thereof) in Markdown. I get why it didn't, it's trying to be positive about something that is an overwhelming net positive for the world, but I think a "warts-and-all" treatment of the history would be more honest.
I appreciate that Gruber brought this very helpful thing into the world, but OTOH he was such a prick about the whole Standard Markdown debate, for no real reason other than ego. And it resulted in Markdown remaining an ill-defined standard to this day, with occasional compatibility issues still cropping up even though most platforms support most of "Github-flavored Markdown" (itself a stupid name and indicative how badly this has gone).
You've pretty much said what I was going to say. I think John was absolutely inspired in coming up with Markdown, but was a terrible steward. Or perhaps I should say he was unwilling to steward it.
My impression was he pretty much threw up a Perl implementation that was good enough for what he wanted, refused to refine it at all, and declared by the power vested in him by nobody in particular that if any parser implementation differed in behaviour to his (like, to fix bugs or make it better), wasn't true Markdown and wasn't allowed to be called Markdown.
Or perhaps I am being uncharitable in my interpretation of events.
I _don't_ think it was just ego. I think it was a smart strategy because formal standardization tends to bring in complexity, and just letting folks go off on their own and document their own usage (or "flavors") ends up being Good Enough in actual practice. It sucks from a standpoint of what I personally find satisfying, to be clear. But based on what I've seen over the last 20+ years, it is the strategy that is much less likely to yield a format that gets captured by giant companies that own a hyper-corporate standardization process that eventually gets enshittified.
Thanks for responding, Anil! Like I said, I really liked the article overall.
I don't agree that the Standard Markdown effort, had it succeeded as originally laid out, would've resulted in "hyper-corporate standardization". I mean, one of the main actors was Jeff Atwood, just about the least "hyper-corporate" guy there is. And I also don't really see any possible trajectory for Markdown to get "enshittified": after all, for the most part it's just plaintext with formatting conventions that existed way before it. Even if some corporate entity had somehow badly messed it up, markdown.pl and the other pre-existing implementations would have continued to exist.