That example is a pretty good example of why this discussion is acrimonious. Your goal seems to be to parse any and all characters thrown at Markdown in exactly the same way. I don’t think Markdown’s original creator would count accurate parsing of gibberish as goal of the project.
Actually, what makes it acrimonious is that sort of grossly dishonest personal attack. There is no evidence whatsoever of such a goal. Only formatting defined by the specification is specified … that’s tautological. And certainly one should be able to predict what the output would be … how could such a reasonable, desirable goal be a source of acrimony?
All the other Markdown derivatives are not as prominent as yours. Besides, another bad deed does not make your bad deed better
Gruber has made it clear that he does not want others to use the Markdown name for these kinds of projects. I’m not sure why you can’t show the (I would think small) amount of respect required to adhere to his wishes (and his license). I really think this is a great project, and I hope every relevant implementation of Markdown will try to adhere to it, and I hope you’ll expand it with a formal grammar soon, but by actively antagonizing Gruber, you’re only sabotaging yourself, and all of the good that can come out of this.
Prepare to have less beef, then. Jeff only mentioned that BBCode is accepted by Disqus - that has nothing to do with Standard Markdown, and indeed the spec makes no mention of BBCode.
Oh man, time for my mea culpa.
After reading your reply I actually read the spec (which is arguably what I should have done before spouting off) and sure enough I am wrong. I feared that Standard Markdown was an overreaching superset of safe-html, markdown, and bbcode; but this is not the case. It looks like it really is just a restatement of Gruber’s markdown with less ambiguity. Thank you for correcting me, and I apologize for adding to to the confusion in this thread.
If you don’t mind hacking you can do this now. But you will realize that not every author is happy writing in markdown, but prefer docx. So for scholarly content, and probably also for your book project, you also need tools that convert other formats into markdown (so output format in addition to input format), and again Standard Markdown is really important.
I’m not in the habit of refuting things that are true and aren’t relevant to the discussion at hand.
What is relevant here: Excepting Fair Use (another topic) copyright holders get to set the terms of use of their copyrighted materials. If a copyright holder says you can use my creation with certain terms, then you have to play by those rules. Otherwise, he or she can revoke your permission to use that work.
Terms could be anything, for example:
Don’t use the word “Markdown” in your derivative work
Pay me $1,000,000
Wear red pants every day for the rest of your life
Take it or leave it. If you don’t like the terms, you can always try to negotiate new ones, or not use the thing the person created. (In this case, a syntax specification.) Or get really used to wearing red pants.
And that seems to be exactly what the team is doing. They (more or less!) are trying to have a dialogue with the copyright holder here. And maybe he will in fact end up (explicitly) saying "it’s fine to use the word “Markdown” in your name in your case, which would also be perfectly fine. I’m pretty sure @codinghorror has good intentions and will do the right thing, so I’m not too worried about that. But I also want this project to be successful and being in the clear legally is an important part of being successful.
This is great, and needed. But somehow I wish it would go further and try to fix some usability issues with Markdown, not just the way it’s interpreted.
Like the syntax for images, it may not seem like a big deal for developers who are used to remember broken/arbitrary syntaxes, but my clients always have to check the docs. They can’t remember if it’s [ or ( first, which one goes in alt or title. Same for links and other features. I wish a few things were way more intuitive.
“Literally” should not be used for emphasis. The Markdown Tower of Babel has been built figuratively
And, unfortunately, I’m part of the problem, because we’re using Markdown for the contents of news items, in which lines often start with a -, as in:
- My client was wrongly accused - said the defense attorney.
…and we can’t force all our news writers to start backslashing all the -'s in their texts. We’ll use + and * for lists. I think there’s literally no need for three different ways to make a list, other than perhaps to make nested lists look nice.
Thank you for helping to make Markdown more useful, I think you guys have done a great job.
Standard Markdown doesn’t use any of Gruber’s copyrighted materials. The only thing that can be copyrighted is the parser and any of his writing describing how it works. You can’t copyright the name “Markdown” or a syntax/spec.
If Standard Markdown was actually using the code from markdown.pl then the license would be applicable. As far as I know (I haven’t actually reviewed the Standard Markdown code) it’s not, so the license doesn’t apply.
What I mean is that the markup language itself is not copyrighted. Only the written spec for how it should be interpreted.
So John Gruber has a copyright on his spec for Markdown but not for the Markdown markup language, and doesn’t have the name trademarked. Standard Markdown is a different spec for the same markup language. The “Markdown” in “Standard Markdown” is referring to the markup language itself, not Gruber’s original spec.
I will simply note that downey failed to respond to any of my points, instead addressing a strawman. Of course copyright holders get to set the terms of use of their copyrighted materials, but that has no bearing on the fact that names (such as “Markdown”), concepts, and ideas are not copyrightable … only written works are copyrightable. Since the Standard (now Common) Markdown folks are not using John Gruber’s copyrighted source code, they aren’t bound by the license conditions on that source code.
Wrong … The Common Markdown folks are not making use of anyone else’s copyrighted syntax specification. While John MacFarlane’s specification contains some quotations of John Gruber’s text, they are clearly cases of fair use. I doubt that you have actually read the texts under discussion, as it is clear from reading them that there is no copyright infringement and therefore no license conditions are relevant.
For the record, we do believe we had the legal right to use the name. However, we also don’t want to be mired in extended arguments (or worse, legal action) because of that belief. It would be a noisy distraction and everyone involved would risk losing focus on what the real goal is here – progress!
Of course you do have the legal right to use the name, which is not a trademark … and no, not even an unregistered one, which is why no one writes Markdown™ and it’s way too late for Gruber to declare it as such.
I ended up switching to AsciiDoc because it has more formatting solutions than Markdown. I have settled on Asciidoctor.js for all my text-to-html rendering on the web. And the beauty of it is that Asciidoctor also supports all my old Markdown files!
I am a big fan of standards and I applaud the Common Markdown movement. The Asciidoctor people are also pushing for a standard and I’m sure they would be interested in adopting the final Markdown standard.
Despite this is a very old topic and it’s already too late for name suggestions, what about “Markdown Done Right” with .mdr file extension and arrow turned toward right direction on the Markdown logo?
