the more I use markdown, the more I love it. so simple and constrained yet so flexible! good protocols are awesome
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Replying to @sonyasupposedly
Gotta "akshually" you on this one... but it's worth for the drama. Markdown itself is unspecified. It essentially came down to "what Gruber's implementation did" is the standard. 1/n
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Replying to @bara @sonyasupposedly
Yet, it got popular, because it's a nifty little idea. And many sites and applications adopted it, but it was still unspecified. This being the world of software spergs, bothered some (and there are legitimate reasons for that too). 2/n
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Replying to @bara @sonyasupposedly
And one of them (one of the founders of Stack Overflow) started an effort to standardize Markdown, write down a spec, a reference implementation and essentially make it a formal standard (minus the institutional seal of approval). 3/n
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Replying to @bara @sonyasupposedly
He allegedly reached out to Gruber and was ignored. So he moved forward with Standard Markdown. When they finally announced it, Gruber threw a fit and disowned the project and essentially diva-ed his way out of it. After years of having ignored MarkDown. 4/n
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Replying to @bara @sonyasupposedly
Jeff (the guy driving the standard) tried to reached out, renamed the thing to DownMark and offered an olive branch, to be totally rebuffed again, and called a glory hound and stealer of other's ideas. It was not pretty. 5/n
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Replying to @bara @sonyasupposedly
So Jeff and company renamed the thing CommonMark, made the website and de-escalated. Their website is up and they're supposed to release final specs sometime this year (which I suspect won't happen, but that's a different story). 6/n
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Replying to @bara @sonyasupposedly
So, in the end CommonMark is standardized MarkDown. A few companies care about following that standard. There are reference implementations now (good for us in software) and Gruber is back in his cave (better for us in software :) ). 7/7
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Replying to @bara @sonyasupposedly
Hope you enjoyed this bit of trivia! ;)
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I did! Fwiw, I wrote my novels in emacs using ad hoc notation, then wrote a script that converted that to markdown, which Open Office could import.
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