the future of markdown, according to jeff atwood (and/or david greenspan)

[Koen H]

There's seems to be some momentum behind the idea to fork markdown.
The discussion on this list and the parallel blogpost by Jeff Atwood
shows that it's either time Gruber steps up and takes the lead again
or a fork will happen.

I haven't read mr Atwood hinting at the developers being active here.
Some of the things he likes or thinks need to be changed may stand in
contrast to what the majority of developers on this list think should
change. He does have a great reach of audience which can be leveraged.

Stil, if a fork happens that gains a reasonable but not overwhelming
following and is in some small but important aspects different (eg
line breaks) we might be off worse. I believe a fork would be a good
thing to have if fragmentation can be avoided.


> The next best thing would a "descendent" to Markdown that shares the same spirit but is actively maintained.  This is not as good as option A in my opinion.  But if A won't happen, then is option B better than nothing?  The challenge, however, would be getting multiple developers (who are generally happy with their own implementation) to go through the effort to move to a new core syntax (e.g. Rockdown or whatever ---- as an aside, please choose a different name....).  This has been the stumbling block when this proposal has come up before (both on this list and in emails between several developers with their own Markdown derivatives).

>