> If you liked the original, which I created dictatorially, what makes you think you’d like a sequel from by a committee?
What dictator ever accepted that a group of people could do a better job?
The best thing for this new effort is to now embrace the new name (tentatively Rockdown), create the test suite and move on.
Markdown becomes one of the influencers in the footnotes, and hopefully we all get a highly consistent and implementable syntax and set of parsers that we can use.
My hope is that the "committee" isn't open to anyone joining it, or open to too much external influence. dgreensp (from Meteor) seemed to hope that too, and was reaching out to just the right people who could make a difference and whose views were valuable.
It's a shame Jeff felt the need to create such a spectacle when this could've just been presented fait accompli without having such a distracting spectacle.
dgreensp had it right though, but just didn't account for Jeff's character (although he clearly did account for Gruber's by not CC'ing him originally). Here's hoping that he now ignores both of them and pushes forward anyway.
Consistent tests that lead to consistent and implementable parsers... these are good goals.
If Markdown has to have a 5% change in it's DNA to make this work, then this is also a good thing.
I hope dgreensp isn't feeling too disheartened by the clash of personalities of Gruber and Jeff.