I _don't_ think it was just ego. I think it was a smart strategy because formal standardization tends to bring in complexity, and just letting folks go off on their own and document their own usage (or "flavors") ends up being Good Enough in actual practice. It sucks from a standpoint of what I personally find satisfying, to be clear. But based on what I've seen over the last 20+ years, it is the strategy that is much less likely to yield a format that gets captured by giant companies that own a hyper-corporate standardization process that eventually gets enshittified.
Thanks for responding, Anil! Like I said, I really liked the article overall.
I don't agree that the Standard Markdown effort, had it succeeded as originally laid out, would've resulted in "hyper-corporate standardization". I mean, one of the main actors was Jeff Atwood, just about the least "hyper-corporate" guy there is. And I also don't really see any possible trajectory for Markdown to get "enshittified": after all, for the most part it's just plaintext with formatting conventions that existed way before it. Even if some corporate entity had somehow badly messed it up, markdown.pl and the other pre-existing implementations would have continued to exist.
I was texting with John the other night while working on this piece, and reminiscing about my initial quibbles about the format, and I think I had been frustrated by just about everything on your list. I just need you to travel back in time to tell me to fuss more!
It took me a long time to see the variations as a plus and not a minus; as a veteran of the RSS-vs-Atom wars, I was long an advocate of Technical Correctness(tm) like any good coder. But the years since then have made me a lot more amenable to what I think of as a sort of Practical Postelism, which I guess is like applied worse-is-better, where we realize the reality is that we'll _always_ have forks and multiplicities, so we should see it as a feature instead of a bug. It's like accepting that hardware will fail, and building it into the system.
I mean, HTML itself is well specified in the streets, and infinitely different flavors in the sheets. I don't _like_ that, the part of me that writes code _hates_ that. But the part of me that wants systems to succeed just had to sort of respect it.
Ah, Anil, but have you fought the plaintext syntax wars yet?
Jokes apart, regular, standardised, visually-suggestive syntax is a key reason I've stuck with org-mode despite its limited acceptance in the world at large.
The many flavours of markdown make it /less/ portable than org syntax, in my experience. As the post below says, "Pandoc lists six different Markdown flavors as output formats." This is not great for collaboration --- now we need some sort of middleware or advanced editor to help people work with more than one syntax format. Besides, mixing syntax in the same document is a boo-boo, because parsers only work at file-level, not semantic token level.
Owing to this, at times, I go as far as to /author in orgmode, but share in markdown/ (org-export), and slurp back and forth (tangle / detangle).
This is a good call. I know it's been suggested multiple times over the years; I wonder what the rationale was for rejecting the format, or at least having the option to render a file when it's loaded. (Maybe a "display as HTML" button or the like would be required before it would be rendered.)
The overlap between these Markdown formats is actually larger than with many other formats. Possibly even larger than HTML’s overlap back when MS Explorer was the dominant browser.
> Possibly even larger than HTML’s overlap back when MS Explorer was the dominant browser.
No way. You were never left in doubt about whether a normal HTML tag would work, or whether tables were available or would become a jumbled illegible mess, or whether a line break in the source would become a space or a hard break. And that’s just the first three things that occur to me.
You have to be willingly ignoring CommonMark, these days.
I understand it doesn't have all the extensions one might hope, but to not parse the basics like the examples in the spec say is just doing everyone a disservice.
I know it seems quite absurd! I actually just added in to this piece a photo I took of the CNN screen that (I believe) was the first mention of the word "blog" that they ever put on-screen; it also has a mention of Hart's campaign. Very low-res, but the potato quality is worth it for the historical value, I think.
I actually had a digression into "worse is better", but the piece was already pushing 5,000 words, so I figured I probably was better of leaving out such a big topic. But you're right that's a larger trend that mattered. I think of it more as a triumph of Postelism in the Internet at large as more people came online, too.
I liked Textile a lot better initially, and it came out first. And interestingly, both launched at the same time on the platform (Movable Type) where Markdown debuted. So it really was sort of a clean A-B test about which one users chose.
This piece was already pretty long, so I cut out most of the sidebar about Dean Allen and Textile, but he was a special guy, and certainly influential on so many parts of this era, not just Markdown.
Prince changed his name because a corporation had refused to give him control over the work he created, and wouldn't let him release work under the name that he was born with. (Sort of the template for "Taylor's Version" decades later.) And he then used a logo that became the most successful personal logo of all time, not a mishmash of design-by-committee.
So, basically the _opposite_ of an incoherent brand based around training on content that was gathered from creators without consent, being foisted onto employees who didn't ask for it, with an ugly logo that nobody will ever remember.
