John Gruber, creator of markdown, wrong about markdown again. (https://airsource.co.uk/blog/2014/09/04/markdown-has-been-st...)
Alternatively: Giant Apple nerd is bemused to see Apple implementing something he created.
I mean it’s lot like he’s touting some fringe thing just because he made it. It must be so weird to see markdown become the lingua franca of everything from online forums to LLMs.
As its author, he’s right though. There really shouldn’t be a standard considered Standard Markdown. It muddies the fact that it wasn’t published by its author.
Maybe Common Markdown would have been a better name between a few large orgs.
It was briefly renamed Common Markdown as well, and John hated on that as well, so it became CommonMark.
And now we're in an odd position where Github and friends all validate their implementations against the CommonMark suites, but refer to the result as "Markdown" to their users, which makes the work they're doing maintaining that stuff especially thankless.
And then there is GFM (Github Flavoured Markdown), which is a bit different from Common Mark.
At the time of the SM/CM/CommonMark kerfuffle a decade ago, Gruber was quite explicit that "X Flavored Markdown" was perfectly fine with him— Atwood even includes the relevant podcast snippet:
https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...
Honestly the whole thing is so ridiculous.
The thing he’s wrong about is not the name, it’s that markdown doesn’t need a standard. Markdown absolutely needed a spec, and gruber resisted that which is why the spec was done without him and has to be confusingly called CommonMark instead of just being markdown.
By this logic, since Ritchie died in 2011, you cannot have a "Standard C" because it's not from the author
Well, there's this: https://commonmark.org
But everyone seems to have their own slightly different flavor, either pre- or post- that "standardization".
Notably, Github's superset:
Given Github's owner, it's right out of their Embrace, Extend ... playbook.
GFM predates microsoft’s acquisition of github by one year as a formal spec and six years as an informal one - but ms hardly has a monopoly on embrace-extend-extinguish.