Comment by adgar2

13 years ago

> What an embarrassing post to be occupying the top of this thread. Blaming Markdown.pl for security flaws?

I believe markdown.pl is being blamed for over 100 bugs. Not just security flaws.

> I suppose the memory corruption bugs in the "optimized" C Markdown parsers are somehow his fault too?

Strawman, you're better than that.

> He wrote a text-to-HTML parser with a particularly elegant little language design and got on with his life

And he did a horrible job of it. Horrible. But he considers himself the BDFL of Markdown. Break that down for me.

> which involves writing more than keeping up with bug reports in Perl scripts

He clearly can't keep up with any bug reports, so it's good his life is more broad than bug reports.

> Get over yourself; comments like this make us all look bad.

No, comments like this make us look like we have higher expectations than "it worked on my machine, suck a dick!"

> And he did a horrible job of it. Horrible. But he considers himself the BDFL of Markdown. Break that down for me.

Christ, you're being a dick. All John Gruber did to you was design a minimalist markup language and write a quick-and-dirty proof-of-concept Perl script to implement it. Just use a better implementation and get on with your day.

  • If that was all he did, it would be fine. But it isn't. His website still encourages people to use his script and his specification, even though they are known to be buggy. If you publish something on the internet and it turns out be wrong or defective, you have a moral obligation to point that out, especially if better alternatives are available.

    • > If you publish something on the Internet and it turns out to be wrong or defective, you have a moral obligation to point that out

      No you don't, that's insane.

      1 reply →

  • This submission, which suggests forking or standardizing Markdown, has currently over 400 points. My guess is that "just use a better implementation and get on with your day" is not a good enough answer for many of us, including Jeff Atwood and David Greenspan.

>> But he considers himself the BDFL of Markdown

Well he needs to be something other than a pathetic apple fanboy! :D