My thoughts on Standard Markdown/Common Markdown/Whatever John Gruber Won't Throw a Hissy Fit About If We Name It That Markdown:
For once, something about Markdown is actually high profile enough that it might not require an explanation. But, see here for one if needed.
Standard/Common/etc. is actually not all that interesting to me personally, because I don't write in vanilla MD2; I use MultiMarkdown. And because it's not like it's a huge ambitious departure; it's basically just trying to clear up ambiguities that result from Gruber having functionally abandoned vanilla MD for about a decade. I doubt the proposed changes will make much of a noticeable difference to people who write in MarkDown. (It could matter a lot to people who are building things that use Markdown, though.)
The announcement of The Markdown Formerly Known as Standard had some problems -- in particular, it wasn't clear enough what it is they're trying to do. That led to a lot of confusion, especially for folks who read their front page but didn't actually look at the spec.
But I really don't understand Gruber's reaction at all.1
My gut sense of the situation is:
Say someone created an open-source project, refused to maintain it, then lashed out at someone who forked it w/too similar a name?
— Nick (@kukkurovaca) September 4, 2014That would be weird, right?
— Nick (@kukkurovaca) September 4, 2014Gruber hasn't done anything with or to Markdown in a very long time. Even the way he's talking about it now seems to keep circling back to its branding/SEO value rather than anything functional.
Meanwhile, it's become extremely important to a lot of people -- although almost never in vanilla form, b/c vanilla Markdown does very little. Markdown is only interesting because of what others have built on top of it.
Plus, the spec and code for Standard/Common/whatever was mostly done by John MacFarlane, who makes Pandoc, and is clearly a goddamn wizard.