mou makes its funding goal for a 1.0 release

[Virgil Arrington]

On 11/10/2014 01:20 AM, ubi de feo wrote:
> I support MD as an open effort, but I feel it will never really be a 
> standard.
> it is enjoying a worse fate than HTML in 1999 with all the differences 
> across its "dialects".
> this ML – and I've only been here for a year or so – is a collection 
> of efforts, drafts (at least one per quarter), religion and despair,
> when it comes to defining a standard for MarkDown.
>

As a mere user, I've noticed the same thing. One of the purported 
benefits of markdown is its portability, i.e., the ability of the user 
to write in any editor, knowing that he can then load it into any number 
of parsers and get consistent results.

But, with all the different flavors out there, one now has to think, 
"which parser will I use to convert this file?" and insert markdown 
accordingly. I recently discovered at least four different ways in which 
parsers deal with typographic quotes and dashes, from the original 
SmartyPants to the Python Markdown implementation of SmartyPants to the 
Calibre implementation of it to RMarkdown's implementation (not to 
mention ReStructuredText and Textile, both of which do it differently, 
yet). So, I have to commit to a given dialect and converter before I 
begin to type. To me, that's defeating one of the fundamental purposes 
of markdown.

Virgil
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