text/markdown effort in IETF (invite)

Fletcher T. Penney fletcher at fletcherpenney.net
Wed Jul 9 15:18:36 EDT 2014


I disagree with the section quoted below.

To my knowledge, Gruber has not officially trademarked "Markdown".

Markdown was a word before Gruber used it, but for different contexts.

I am not a lawyer.

However, in the world of honest people, the word "Markdown" as applied 
to lightweight text formats belongs to Gruber.  Others may play off of 
it (PHP Markdown Extra, my own MultiMarkdown, etc.), but I can't create 
an entirely new syntax and call it Markdown.

FTP


On 7/9/14, 3:06 PM, Sean Leonard wrote:
>
> I am of the same view. Anyone can call anything "Markdown"--no one is
> stopping them. Just as anyone can call anything "ASCII art" or "mashups"
> (i.e., there might be an ASCII standard but what people do with it is
> totally different--it has become a cultural phenomenon). In the draft, I
> restricted the eligible formats to "things based on John Gruber's
> original Markdown tool and syntax from 2004".

-- 
Fletcher T. Penney
fletcher at fletcherpenney.net


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