Is there anyone would like to hold a standard organization of Markdown syntax?

[Richard Caldwell]

Similar ideas for a standard for extensions have been kicked around in the past. It always collapses in arguments about what such a standard should look like. 

There are two main problems with such an effort. First, there is no broad consensus among users on what the objective of such a standard should be. At one end of the spectrum you have relative Markdown purists for whom simple, readable plain text formatting is paramount and the base standard only needs a few key extensions. At the other end of the spectrum you have those who want Markdown to be a complete rich text markup language and are willing to accept more complex, less readable markup to achieve that goal. 

Efforts usually break down during bickering among those factions so we never get to the second problem: implementers. Those who implement Markdown extensions generally do so to meet their own needs or preferences. It's not at all certain that they would update their work to meet a standard that may not do what they want - particularly when we can't achieve a broad consensus on such a standard in the first place. 

In my view, the only hope for such an effort would be to get authors of most the popular extensions to sign on and come up with a process for forming such a standard among themselves before all the public bickering starts. 

Good luck. 


----- Original Message -----

From: "Junyi Yan" <mytharcher at gmail.com> 
To: markdown-discuss at six.pairlist.net 
Sent: Friday, May 18, 2012 11:02:41 PM 
Subject: Is there anyone would like to hold a standard organization of Markdown syntax? 

My stackoverflow question here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9222990/is-there-an-official-organization-for-discussing-or-releasing-standard-markdown . And github issue here: https://github.com/michelf/php-markdown/issues/27 . 


So, if there were somebody hold that, the markdown world would be much better than ever! 


If held, the ORG need a concil to discuss standard, and a website to publish standard. I think most of the author who implemented markdown converter in any language could be the concil member, not only the original author (Because he has not been maintaining the syntax for so long time.). 


OK, what's your idea? 


mytharcher 
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