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Comment by phren0logy | Hacker News Reader

He said in his podcast a few weeks ago that he thought it was unnecessary, as the ambiguity allowed for different flavors with different uses. I'm assuming the reference to the Yankees being the best team in baseball is directed at Gruber.

During that podcast, Gruber encouraged that group to consider not calling what they were doing Markdown. Something to the effect of, "Come up with your own thing, and see if it catches on." He noted that the ambiguity is probably what has made Markdown useful to such diverse groups with different needs, and should be preserved.

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> During that podcast, Gruber encouraged that group to consider not calling what they were doing Markdown.

John Gruber's stance was a little stronger than this - he currently has a reasonable claim to the trademark Markdown, as a term he coined and popularized for this use. This group's use of the brand "Standard Markdown" to describe something the owner of "Markdown" disagrees with seems ill-advised. He's now forced to either try to push them off the name or effectively abandon the trademark to genericization.

He's already lost it to genericization. Trademarks distinguish vendors in a market place; plenty of different people operate services that provide "Markdown" formatting that are not the original vendor and are incompatible. Without having taken any steps to license other people's uses of the term, it's not operating as a trademark in any normal sense (unregistered or not).

I don't know how well genericization applies to this, markdown was a loosely defined specification, intentionally encouraging modification. all the "incompatible" versions of markdown are within what he intended.

further, its just the name of a spec, should the owner of a spec really be expected to continuously hunt down and test/validate every implementation of their specification? that doesn't exactly seem possible in the slightest.

I don't think he would have trademark protections for something like this for other reasons, I do wonder if there is anything similar that applies in this situation

> should the owner of a spec really be expected to continuously hunt down and test/validate every implementation of their specification?

I'm pretty sure thats exactly what trademark law says you have to do. You have to defend your trademark. You can't go ten years letting everyone use the Markdown brand where ever they want, and then suddenly decide one day you want to start controlling it.

So, Gruber is fine with people implementing their own markdown processors without his permission, and still call it markdown, and he even likes it when they do that, he likes the flexibility and multiple flavors of markdown.

But if people implementing their own markdown processors try to write a spec or grammar for what they are implementing... he is not fine with it, and considers legal action? It's okay to write a markdown parser, as long as you don't write a spec for it?

There may be a way to justify that position rationally, but I doubt there is legally. He's already abandoned any claims to trademark, by making it clear he's okay with people making their own markdown parsers and describing them as 'markdown parsers', without his permission.

My position (and what I see others taking) is not a problem with formalizing Markdown, which many see as a good thing, but the name.

If they made this an called it StackMark it would be fine.

But this feels more like a power play. Like when Microsoft came and made Visual J++ in an attempt to take control of Java from Sun. It seems oddly and unnecessarily mean spirited and hostile. The name seems designed to either engender confusion or as a slight against the original.

How about "Specification-flavored Markdown"?

I'd accept that. Seems unwieldily (so it wouldn't be my choice), but I don't think it's outright hostile to the original.

We've got Disqus, Stack Overflow, GitHub, and others. John has referred in the past that he doesn't mind how GitHub has GitHub flavored mark down. This new one could be called Atwood flavored (to pick a name I know is involved). Or they could have stuck with GitHub Flavored markdown and just expand the GitHub flavor.

> he currently has a reasonable claim to the trademark Markdown, as a term he coined and popularized for this use.

Coining and popularizing a term is not a basis for a reasonable claim to a trademark. Trademark rights stem from one source: bona fide use of the mark in the ordinary course of trade. If its not used as a mark identifying and distinguishing the source of a product in commercial transactions, its not a trademark.

> He's now forced to either try to push them off the name or effectively abandon the trademark to genericization.

If there was ever a good claim that it was a trademark (which I don't see the evidence for), I think there's a pretty strong claim that it has already been lost to genericization, given the long-standing established uses on a variety of unlicensed implementations with differing sources.

The ambiguity of Markdown formats has been nothing but a minor pain to me. It makes it harder to search for syntax advice, that's for sure, and 99% of us casual users are doing just that.

I am excited for a well-documented, standard Markdown format to be the top link on Google.

I remember listening, but wish I could find the episode again. Do you remember which one it was?

I believe it was the 2 parter with Marco Arment. Either this one: https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2014/07/19/ep-088 or this: https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2014/07/19/ep-089

Just several hours to sift through :)

It's the episode of The Talk Show with Marco Arment as a guest.

It's starts at about 1:15:00 in Episode 88.

Listen to it on Overcast.fm

"Atwood's crusade"

https://overcast.fm/podcasts/episode/344902019595#t=4527

I've landed on the guy's markdown pages (he refers to this in the podcast) several times, trying to figure out how to do stuff in markdown. I find the page hard to read (the font is tiny; I always resize it), and the examples rarely seem to describe what I am trying to achieve.

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