Standard Markdown Is Now Common Markdown
blog.codinghorror.com
blog.codinghorror.com
http://www.metafilter.com/142475/Standard-flavored-Markdown#...
Yes, ambiguity is a feature in this case. Markdown was designed from the top down by a writer, for writers. This gives it the rare characteristic of being intuitive to understand and use, but not necessarily easy (or even unambiguously possible) to implement. The lack of a standard helps keep people honest by making them follow the spirit of the law, not the letter, as you see happening with things like HTML and CSS. In fact, I'd argue that's the entire philosophy behind Markdown: usable and understandable by ordinary humans, all the way down to the spec. (Ever try reading the C spec? It feels like you need a PhD to get anything out of it.)
I'm with Gruber that Markdown is successful because of its ambiguous (read: easy-to-understand) design, not in spite of it. The proof is clearly in the pudding. My feeling is that the people running into edge cases are trying to use Markdown as some sort of replacement for HTML, not a massively simplified syntax for writing articles and pages.
What I see here is a group of developers who arrogantly think that they know better than Gruber what to do with Markdown. They could have called it anything else, but they chose to make the issue political. It's juvenile, especially coming from people who we're supposed to look up to in the tech community.
According to Gruber, Markdown is the hardest thing he's ever worked on. He didn't spend a week on it, the idea was not obvious, and its success was not accidental. If I was him, I'd absolutely be seeing red too..
And let me tell you, HTML's early non-specificity did NOT cause people to follow the spirit of the law, nor did it make many people consider it usable and understandable by ordinary humans.
If someone writes a Markdown document and it’s littered with complicated directives and tricky bits of syntax which rely on the specific implementation to work, but aren’t readable as plain text, then they’re not really following the spirit of Markdown.
By contrast, since HTML isn’t intended to be read directly, any hacky bit of markup, however awful it makes reading the raw file, is fair game as long as the browser output is pretty.
AND intended to be consumed by machines.
For example. John Gruber's markdown perl script transforms his Markdown into HTML.
It's easy to see how Gruber is affected by the Reality Distortion Field... the idea is entirely obvious, has gigabytes of prior art (albeit without, dare I say it, standardization).
Witness decades of email, Usenet, BBS postings that used _, * etc for emphasis, let alone the claim that lists in that format are non obvious... well, frankly laughable.
I recognise that line of reasoning from the RSS 2.0 days. And how RSS feeds were okay for years until Dave Winer decided one day that they were funky. Having a deterministic standard is a quality metric.
On Gruber's podcast: he notes that writers should check whether something is valid Markdown by rendering it and seeing the output ( https://overcast.fm/podcasts/episode/344902019595#t=4527 ). paraphrasing his logic: If the output is wrong, that means the input needs fixing. That is an assertion that the code implementation is the specification. And we've been down that road before ( bugwards compatible implementations of Internet Explorer, for example )
Ambiguity is not a good basis for a data structure specification. An undefined behaviour means that all possible behaviours are correct.
> This gives it the rare characteristic of being intuitive to understand and use, but not necessarily easy (or even unambiguously possible) to implement
Ambiguity does not make anything easy to understand or use. Not possible to implement is not a feature of any language.
If that's even remotely true, I hope he never touches any piece of code in his life again.
For god's sake, just look at his implementation: "Hacked together after a night of binge drinking" would be the perfect description of it.
OK.
> 2. Shut down the standardmarkdown.com domain, and don't redirect it.
Don't redirect it? Seriously?
> 3. Apologize.
This guy is actually a prick.
EDIT: OK that was unfair. If I was in Gruber's position, maybe I'd be angry, and maybe I would have demanded an apology; it doesn't make him a prick. But the "don't redirect" thing seems petty.
He created something that got popular (and which was derivative itself, in the first place, but anyway), and when people try to standardize and fix its flaws, he objects.
Any decent, non-prick, person in the tech world that I know of would be happy and flattered to have his 10+ years neglected project be improved, standardized and fixed, and either he would get involved in the process, or say "sorry guys, I don't have time, but I wish you all the luck".
This prima-donna behavior means he should be left out for any future discussion regarding Markdown and ignored.
No. He is only objecting to the name. He holds rights to the name[1], similarly to Linus Torvolds holding rights to "Linux"[2]. Anyone can fork Linux, but forks lose the name unless Linus approves. Otherwise the name loses meaning and value fast.
Would you call Torvolds a prima-donna? And if he is, has that been a good or bad thing for Linux?
[1] http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/license
[2] Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Linux%20is%20a%20registered%20t...
Neither the name “Markdown” nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
I believe that a spec is a derived product, at least partially, from the code?
Nevertheless, we're talking about who's being a "prick" here, and being a class-A prick has nothing to due with the law. The "Gruber is a prick" vs "Atwood is a prick" debate has been done before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4716322. If they had stuck with the idea to name it "Rockdown", there would be no problem. In fact, we can now see that Atwood is being dishonest when he says:
> "We then waited two weeks for a response. There was no response, so we assumed that John Gruber was either OK with the project (and its name), or didn't care. So we proceeded."
Gruber had already responded TWO YEARS prior with a "No!"
FWIW, I don't like Gruber. But that's not a good reason to overlook Atwood's dick moves.
Maybe it's time for a little humor? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8272614
-
To what?
> This guy is actually a prick.
That escalated quickly.
These people picked it up, and rather renaming it (which they should have done, but which also would have resulted in a tirade from gruber) they kept his name.
Que tirade from gruber.
That's where the quick escalation happened.
It's not like HN people don't know follow OSS projects and can't tell when the creator of one is being an inpediment.
Even if that's not how all "open source" works, its how the sucessful projects do.
Honestly, this seems pretty reasonable to me. I also don't think that the Common Markdown implementors gave Gruber a sufficient amount of time to respond: "We haven't heard back after replying last night, and I'm not sure we ever will..." (emphasis mine). Last night? This is one of Gruber's most famous projects, and you're giving him hours to respond?
Honestly, I think they're going about this the wrong way. This group has people at both Stack Overflow, Reddit, and Github, three of the most prominent users of Markdown. Why not rename their version completely? It would eliminate the possibility of future conflict (which IMO is almost guaranteed). They don't need the name recognition--Markdown has needed this for a while, and I think it will be adopted fairly quickly.
As for "new" names, how about:
* ReMD (pronounced "remedy"): fairly standard programming naming convention--adding "Re" as a prefix. Also easy to Google.
* Vernacular: Longer, less common word.
Good luck to Atwood and Co.. I really do hope they find a way to keep the project going.
Last night? This is one of Gruber's most famous
projects, and you're giving him hours to respond?
The entire time, he's alternated between being uncommunicative and outright dismissive of any attempts to clarify his original Markdown syntax.
The fact that they're involving him at all is a courtesy, a well-intentioned mistake. A mistake I definitely would have made too. (Not that I have the 1/1,000 of Jeff Atwood's coding chops or industry influence!) In hindsight, they should have forked and never looked back at Gruber.
These are necessary mistakes. Better to have tried to get John Gruber on board and failed, than to not have tried.
That way they can always point at the conversation to show that they did try, but Gruber was not interested in collaborating. Otherwise, John Gruber always have the "they stole Markdown from me. They didn't even ask me. I was willing to collaborate." excuse.
It's an open source thing, try to work within the community before forking. Forking is a last resort. This might get to the point where forking is now a reasonable course of action.
Such change is inevitable, since markdown.pl is downright buggy. This hurts the validity of Gruber's claim a lot in my opinion.
And since this new standard differs so little, compared to the other flavours who do call themselves "FooBar Markdown" without much reaction from Gruber, I think it's only reasonable they call themselves "Markdown" as well.
I don't recall, John McCarthy complaining about Common Lisp taking a name claiming they were now the new and official Lisp. And this Lisp differs quite considerably from his original, with lexical scope and all. Even Scheme and Clojure, who don't bear the name, say all over that they're a Lisp.
So, I can't be sympathetic to Gruber's reaction. He abandoned ship. He forfeited the right to steer it.
> After a day and a half of technical discussion, this group went off to the Oakland Original, a greasy submarine sandwich place not far from CMU. During and after lunch the topic of the name for the Lisp came up, and such obvious names as NIL and SPICE Lisp were proposed and rejected—as giving too much credit to one group and not enough to others—and such non-obvious names as Yu-Hsiang Lisp were also proposed and reluctantly rejected.
> The name felt to be best was “Standard Lisp,” but another dialect was known by that name already. In searching for similar words, the name “Common Lisp” came up. Gabriel remarked that this wasn’t a good name because we were trying to define an Elitist Lisp, and “Common Lisp” sounded too much like “Common Man Lisp.”
> The naming discussion resumed at dinner at the Pleasure Bar, an Italian restaurant in another Pittsburgh district, but no luck was had by all.
> Later in E-mail, Moon referred to “whatever we call this common Lisp,” and this time, amongst great sadness and consternation that a better name could not be had, it was selected.
I don't disagree that it is still mostly Markdown. I do understand the Gruber complaint about it not being a strict superset. I see it as similar to C/C++. Not all C code is valid C++ code--they have diverged. No one would deny that they have a very closely shared heritage.
On what grounds? I do not believe the legal situation is that clear-cut.
As far as the code goes, copyright is not involved as they don't use his code. The trademark hasn't been enforced and there are no trade secrets or patents involved.
The only legal issue I see involves the format itself. I'm not sure what US laws say about that, but I'd be surprised if there was an issue.
Gruber has a registered trademark or has he used the "TM" designator to denote a non-registered but protected trademark? My understanding is that if he has done neither, he doesn't have a legal claim to the name.
C++ added features to C. Common Markdown's main purpose is not to add features to Markdown; rather, its purpose is to standardize it:
> We propose a standard, unambiguous syntax specification for Markdown, along with a suite of comprehensive tests to validate Markdown implementations against this specification. We believe this is necessary, even essential, for the future of Markdown.
I think the Common Markdown community may (and should) add a grammar at some point, based on some discussion two days ago.
If multiple independent implementations of an idea start appearing, sooner or later this is going to happen. And at that point what control can you claim to have other than the name? These guys presumably have their own code, and I'm pretty sure sites like reddit have a heavier investment in Markdown than Gruber.
Meanwhile he seems unreasonably widely respected, despite, like Marco, very obviously being quite the jerk.
He's succeeded in building a cult of personality, and his ego can't handle having the One Thing He Ever Created fixed.
For this reason- I think they should have come up with a wholly new name. Using the word "markdown" gives gruber too much credit. It's not like he invented JSON or anything.
I don't know what your contributions are to the tech community but I'd be well chuffed if any of my tech contributions had the wide reach of markdown.
Now consider what Doug Crockford labels himself as: discoverer of JSON.
DC is self-aware, humble, and thoughtful.
Contrast that with today's displayed behaviour: name-calling, puffery, 3 demands (apology, cease and no-redirect, new name).
Not to mention the app is not anything to write home about at all.
He was at best a web designer back when the web didn't even know AJAX.
So the whole issue comes down to the word "Standard" versus "Common." Not the word "Markdown." And not any of this (silly) "it's supposed to be ambiguous" argument.
Done and done, I suppose.
Oh, and it's the "don't redirect standardmarkdown.com" bit that really strikes me as juvenile, for some reason.
That said, to take something that is not your original work and to declare it "Standard" or even "Common" is a massive faux pas in my view. It is not yours, it is not your place to declare your variant to be either standard or common. Especially when practically nobody has heard of if.
We can argue about what are adequate and reasonable IP laws but a large percentage of the tech industry is based on the legal ability to own ideas and concepts.
Gruber was apparently unresponsive to them when they asked about it, and then was publicly cranky.
So neither side looks great. But I'd say Gruber feels more sympathetic to me.
But it's pretty clear that there's a need for it at this point.. the amount of work and coordination that went into it almost proves the point. The fact that it's used everywhere certainly does.
It can be pretty hard to do the right thing in a lot of cases without ruffling some feathers. That's how I see this whole situation.
I do disagree that there'd have been a kerfuffle over this if they'd picked a completely new name, though. I'm sure there'd have been some people who said "Markdown was just fine for me" and grumbled, but the widespread debate that Standard Markdown caused? Unlikely.
Given that the people involved have enough clout to cause widespread use of this format regardless of the name, picking a name they knew would be contentious based on their previous communication with Gruber seems like an unfortunate distraction from something new and useful.
Plus, of course, in this case it's not actually abandoned. It's in the state Gruber apparently wants it to be in, and others disagree. That changes the situation noticeably.
Harsh comparison, but I feel it reflect the current situation well.
The proper course of action here is a fork, which has no equivalent in your analogy. Gruber's Markdown remains as he likes it, under the name it's already widely known as. The new Markdown-based language picks a suitably disambiguated name and becomes what its maintainers want it to be.
And in this case I do hope that the hostile fork actually becomes what it aims for: standard/common and basically makes everyone forget about Markdown.pl.
They didn't mention that they'd be calling it Standard Markdown when they emailed him about it - and he was on vacation when it happened...
I think it's great if they want to move the idea forward, but if he wants them to come up with their own name (which he very publicly said before this all happened) then that would have been the right thing to do...
Dude's stance is: That's fine, I guess... but use your own name.
Seems reasonable.
At least by the account of the Standard/CommonMarkdown team, it looks more like:
Dude creates something. It gets widely adopted (and distorted along the way). Other group of people want to improve it by standardizing it (not changing it).
Dude's stance is: ...
Standardizers: so, uh, do you want to take part?
Dude's stance is: ...
Standardizers: do you at least agree with the name?
Dude's stance is: ...
Standardizers: look, we've gone ahead and did this.
Dude's stance is: outrageous!
(Ironies get exchanged by both sides)
Standardizers: ok, we apologize for the name grab. Here is a list of alternative names we could use (list). Which one do you prefer?
Dude's stance is: ...
(while tweeting ironies about it, presumably instead of replying to their email)
Standardizers: ok, we've gone ahead and picked one alternative.
Dude's stance will be (I'm guessing): blasphemy!
The complaint about Standard Markdown was that it appeared to be hijacking the existing "brand" in order to present itself as the definitive version.
One definition of "Common" means prevalent and it seems to me that this word was picked not to solve the above problem but to get around it by making Gruber look like a dick for objecting again to the same problem.
Ironically, a second definition of "common" is "showing a lack of taste."
Or, alternatively, the largest sites that all use Markdown wanted to figure out how to build a Common Markdown format that they could all agree on (or Standardize on), since the original hadn't been touched in a decade.
Yes, the License does say that derivative works shouldn't use the Markdown name. And yes, I'll even agree that it's a somewhat classless move, assuming you ignore years of context. "Github Flavored Markdown" is a thing, has been for a very long time. Not a peep from Gruber about it. It is highly reasonable to expect that "Common Markdown" (or even "Standard Markdown") might not raise any hackles.
C'mon, you really think folks are sitting around, plotting the best way to steal John Gruber's one serious project?
In the podcast John Gruber did with Marco Arment ( https://overcast.fm/podcasts/episode/344902019595#t=4527 ), John Gruber notes "Github Flavoured Markdown" is a good product name.
He also says that they should standardise using a different name.
Nonetheless, a tiny percentage of reddit users who know how to use the formatting still likely represents a majority of the set of people who know about Markdown formatting.
> Ironically, a second definition of "common" is "showing a lack of taste."
• The top implementors were frustrated with an old, vague spec that doesn't specify error handling.
• The original owner had stopped developing the spec, and the spec fails to describe new extensions and de-facto standards that have emerged since.
• The implementors wrote a new, much more complete spec from scratch under a name that implies taking ownership.
• And then there's a childish fight about forking.
Is it fair? I think Wittgenstein would call it fair. If "Markdown" in popular usage doesn't refer to a Perl program by John Gruber but to a formatting mechanism in use on reddit and github, then Markdown is a formatting mechanism in use on StackExchange et alii in the current language-game. If the majority of Markdown users were using Markdown.pl and/or any other software or system promulgated by John Gruber, he has a case.
What we do know is that reddit and github have called their systems -- and various extensions, like github's syntax highlighting -- "Markdown" for years, without so much as a peep. I think "Standardized Markdown" might be a little more accurate, possibly easier on the creator...
...but I also suspect that some part of Gruber's annoyance relates to his not being included at all in the initial discussions. Was it really reasonable to work on this project for "two years" (does it take two years to write a ten-page standard?) without sincerely reaching out to the initial author? For the most part, the developers of $qualifier Markdown clarified syntactic ambiguities and added a slightly less painful code-block syntax. Most of the "heavy lifting" in this format was done by John Gruber, so I can appreciate his annoyance even if I disagree.
His powers of getting people to read his one-line blog and other worthless content continue to amaze me.
Gruber's consistently had some of the best analysis on Apple (and some other aspects of the tech industry). He's been writing for over 10 years, it has made him successful, and he's been able to cultivate direct access to Apple (http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-06/meet-apples-...) and the occasional response from Jobs himself (http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/10/steve-jobs-responds-to-ipho...).
I'm with Atwood on this one, but seeing the peanut gallery make stupid and snarky comments about Gruber himself is starting to piss me off.
But the takeaway is that his quality content represents only a drop in the ocean of his worthless one-line microthroughts and general blabbery and whining.
If this utopian standard really is the best, then it will win market share by that virtue.
Markdown isn't a regular language. The canonical documentation is written with a tiny font on a grey background, and Atwood's interest is a response to the computer science issues which arise when markdown is used on a site at the scale of StackOverflow. He's been confronting its implementation issues since at least June 2008 [1] and looking at developing a proper markdown parser since January 2010.[2]
It feels (to me), like the CommonMarkdown folk are somewhat frustrated with Gruber.. While he created the initial spec for the format, he hasn't been interested in it for years, and they feel someone needs to own/control it.
By calling the new spec Standard (or common) Markdown, they're implying that they're the rightful team in charge of defining the format, what is/isn't compatible, and how to verify it.
They're treating Gruber very carefully - Giving him Cameos and token references, but not taking his views seriously. It reminds me a little of Stan Lee in the new Marvel movies - He's a quirky old uncle, not someone who would actually make decisions on the ground.
For example - The CommonMarkdown team say they've been working on this for 2 years, but only sent the current name to Gruber two weeks ago - When he didn't reply, they pushed forward anyway. His original license had asked that people don't use the name Markdown for derived works, but this seems to have been ignored.
They also felt that he wasn't a modern or relevant user of Markdown - The team seems focused on people who are using Markdown as a commenting format, more than the authoring format Gruber uses it as.
My guess is that releasing publicly was a forcing function - The team didn't have a response from Gruber, and didn't know if or when they'd get one.
The quote "I assure you that we did not choose the name to make you, or anyone else, angry." seems particularly telling - They didn't write that "We thought this would be OK", or "We thought you'd like this".. Just that they didn't do it with a deliberate goal of making any specific person angry. This seems like a low bar ;)
After they released earlier this week, my guess is that the blowback was somewhat frustrating. They had worked for years on trying to standardize the format, but all anyone was focusing on was the name!
Gruber asked them to shut it down, but (I'm guessing) wasn't interested in an in-depth dialog.
Since they still want to proceed with the project, and (again guessing) still want to be viewed as the default/standard version, they've renamed their project to "Common Markdown".
While they don't have any particular permission for this name either, it has many of the same connotations, but isn't the exact same name. My supposition is that they're betting that since they've now "acquiesced", and changed the name, Gruber will seem unreasonable if he continues to push against them.
Despite having no assurance that the new name is any less objectionable, this lets them concede, and move to PlanB, without risking having to move to a new name altogether.
In any event, as someone without a dog in this particular race, it's somewhat interesting to watch, and try to guess what's really going on ;)
Failing to reply to Jeff's emails is standard passive-aggressive behavior for people like this. It puts him in a position to shout about how he has been wronged.
That's a bit misleading. Jeff has been known to rant about Markdown since at least 2009 [1] and decided to do something about it in 2012 [2].
John was contacted at that time. The idea was the following:
I'd really prefer not to fork the language; I'd much rather collectively help carry the banner of Markdown forward into the future, with the blessing of John Gruber and in collaboration with other popular sites that use Markdown.
That did not happen, so they went ahead on their own. Of course I have no idea what John's private reactions were and if that discussion involved naming issues, but this did not come out of the blue.
[1] http://blog.codinghorror.com/responsible-open-source-code-pa...
https://twitter.com/gruber/status/261650083689426945
https://twitter.com/gruber/status/262287246953164800
It's hard to tell, but Jeff possibly seems to be patronizing John a little in the original 2012 blog post [0] with all the bolded statements about John and the bit about the Yankees. Or he could just as well be trying to have a bit of light-hearted fun with it, I don't think we can judge his intentions in this case.
[0]: http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-future-of-markdown/ (Blog link repeated in this comment for clarity)
http://i.imgur.com/tjo9vMg.png
How the Apple fanboy journalist community rallied and circled the wagons was both expected but viscious. Lots of name calling from that side.
Or, it would be, if this were a formal debate. Which it isn't.
But this is totally unrelated to the immature behavior that he's showing about this whole Markdown drama.
I wasn't calling JG that, I was calling all those around him in the Apple tech press who also piled on with the insults like "jackass".
The point is that one side is name-calling and insulting the other, while the other side is trying to advance a technology for a large number of devs and internet users.
I'm just a commenter on HN with little skin in the game, how I conduct myself matters little in this debate. How the primary parties in this story act is important and revealing.
On the contrary, this effort is led by the person trying help Markdown target real publishing of hard copy outputs, creator of pandoc.
From http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html#pandocs-markdow... :
“Pandoc’s enhanced version of markdown includes syntax for footnotes, tables, flexible ordered lists, definition lists, fenced and highlighted code blocks, superscript, subscript, strikeout, title blocks, automatic tables of contents, embedded LaTeX math, citations, and markdown inside HTML block elements...”
“There is, however, one respect in which pandoc’s aims are different from the original aims of markdown. Whereas markdown was originally designed with HTML generation in mind, pandoc is designed for multiple output formats.”
“Thus, while pandoc allows the embedding of raw HTML, it discourages it, and provides other, non-HTMLish ways of representing important document elements like definition lists, tables, mathematics, and footnotes.”
Publish academic, scientific, and regular books and papers with pandoc markdown, using Latex to generate PDFs.
What is less clear to me is why the Comdard Markdown (which is what I think I'll call it from now on) folks are so desperate to choose a name that delegitimizes other versions of markdown, including the original. And now that they've chosen a second name that does the same (although not quite as blatantly), it's clearly not accidental.
Even people like me who broadly agree with almost everything they've said and tend towards their side in this debate can see it's not a classy move.
No reasonable person could have disagreed with calling it something entirely new.
Some people could have disagreed with calling it something that indicates it's a kind of markdown but doesn't try to usurp the whole ecosystem (eg. X flavoured markdown). I presume Gruber would have still been irritated that it isn't a superset, but most people would have thought it was acceptable given the situation.
Choosing any name with connotations like 'standard', 'basic', 'definitive', 'normal', 'authentic', 'original', 'true', 'certified', 'ratified' or yes, 'common' is pushing the limits of good taste.
Of course, in this case, the obstacles seem mostly about the name and not about the concept, so it's a strange situation...
So the intelligent action is to not call it Markdown, since that requires Gruber's written permission, which is currently a time-sensitive issue, and may be a show stopper later as his format slips more and more out of his control.
Pick a new name, document that it's derived from Markdown (and respects John Gruber's wishes), and create a community around the better specified and test-case based approach to standardisation.
Product prefer using derivative libraries, rather than Gruber's own Markdown implementation. (With or without Gruber's written permission). Pandoc, for example, is a common library for Markdown support, I guess GitHub, Reddit, stack overflow are using their own custom implementations, or implementations that started or during their lifetime became custom implementations.
They're not using his perl code. They aren't bound by any license on it. There was never even a markdown spec to license, just a blog post (and Gruber knows he can't claim any binding license over this spec, because he's not complaining about that, but just the name).
Gruber had an implicit trademark on the name Markdown, but holding a trademark requires that a) you actively exploit it and b) protect it. As for a), he completely abandoned Markdown in 2007, never going anywhere with it after a few years of bad stewardship. And regarding b), since he allowed other implementations of the spec to pop up and use the name 'Markdown' liberally before this one, it has become a common item and no one really has any claim over it.
For all the chest beating, Gruber has no business telling anyone what they can do with Markdown anymore, unless they're directly using Markdown.pl or taking code from it. Which no one is going to do ever again, specially not after this project sails away.
What's more important? Naming or specification? Just don't know why the intelligent people like the word "Markdown" too much to give the new spec a new name. Anyone can explain such great love (and love the new spec more than John Gruber)?
As semisight says[1], "Atwood's reaction complies with the word of the request, but not the spirit of it." Atwood's a smart guy. Someone who lives and breathes (and writes about) this business. It's hard for me not to think this is intentional.
It's not clear whether JA is leading the group's effort, but he's definitely the one speaking the most.
The group shouldn't have been surprised at the continued stonewalling. Perhaps they had a Plan B, perhaps we're seeing it or a hurried Plan C. In any case, I'd agree that the project is getting visibility and attention, but I definitely wouldn't have planned for this. It's too ugly.
The people behind the new Markdown standard (Jeff, GitHub etc) have access to millions of developers and users and can advertise this to high heaven without any Gruber-drama needed. If anything, the drama could be an impediment to adoption (e.g concerning legal status etc).
Definetely not a PR move at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selvage
> The selvages keep the fabric from unraveling or fraying.
I have to say that this sounds a little bit like a non-apology ("I'm sorry the name is so infuriating") and I do think John Gruber is right that the name chosen was a bit rude.
However, Gruber's response or lack thereof comes off as really arrogant to me. I wonder if there is some personal history that we are not aware of? The "you say jump, I say how high?" tweet struck me as an overly aggressive response to what seemed to me a reasonable request back in the day.
Neither the name “Markdown” nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
Plus, if somebody names "specific prior written permission", saying "we haven't heard back since last night so it is okay" seems dishonest to me.
"Hello, your project FooBar is cool, but it is badly specified, and your reference implementation is buggy. Because of that, we see many flavours of FooBar, each incompatible in some subtle way.
"We would like to make another flavour, with a tighter specification, and a less buggy reference implementation. Ideally, this would become the default flavour.
"What name would be acceptable for this?"
I have a strong feeling that Gruber just want his version of Markdown to stay the default, because he's the original author, dammit! He's probably not okay with the project itself, and would stop it if he could. I think the real reason why he finds "standard" so infuriating, is because he knows that with such a name, this flavour may actually catch on. Which may be a bad thing for http://daringfireball.net/ I don't know.
Think about the difference between "Standard Flavored Markedown" (which implies there are other flavors out there, this one is just attempting to be more standardized than others) and "Standard Markdown", which implies this is The one-and-only standard version of Markdown.
Seems like a pretty big assumption to me. Good change though
No such assumption is stated. They decided to honor Gruber's specific requests (stop using the Standard Markup name, kill the domain and don't redirect it, and apology) and, as a courtesy offered him the opportunity to provide feedback on a list of alternative names to use instead of the Standard Markup name.
They never suggested that they took Gruber's silence as equivalent to consent, more that the silence (combined with the general shape of the names he had indicated would probably be acceptable) -- given that they aren't going to cancel the project, and they are going to immediately honor his request to stop using the old name -- leaves them no choice but to choose the new name without further input from Gruber.
I don't see what the formerly "Standard Markdown" project has done to accomodate Gruber as something done because they accepted that he had a legal claim that they were required to comply with, I see it as something that they did because they thought he made a demand that, whether or not it was mandatory, they felt it was reasonable and appropriate to comply with to the extent reasonably practical without tying things up for the project in an open-ended way.
Its not clear to me that Gruber has any basis for a claim in court here:
1) Its not clear to me that the license applies at all, in that its not clear that writing an spec that abstracts and regularizes the common behavior of several programs (which may or may not be all legally derivative of the one at issue) is a non-fair-use derivative work of the program at issue under copyright law, such that a license for that program would be required,
2) Further, its not clear to me that, aside from the copyright license on markdown.pl, that markdown was ever a trademark and, if it was, that it hasn't been either abandoned or genericized.
Of course, Gruber can sue and try to establish any basis for preventing the use of the name that he'd like.
Trademarks depend, I dunno the details. Knowing that would help.
The actual question is whether Markdown has indeed become so generic in programming that it no longer holds a copyright.
I think, yeah, maybe, since there is a standards movement going on.
The process expressed in the code could conceivably be patented, but he's taken no steps to do so to my knowledge. He freely and openly admits that the formatting syntax of Markdown is derived from existing de facto conventions, so good luck to anybody who tries to patent that.
The name "Markdown" could be trademarked, but he never did. Even if he had, his trademark would likely be invalid (genericized) since he has never enforced it.
The former is a standard spec and test suite about derivatives of Markdown, some of which have basis in implicit and explicit blessing to use the name "Markdown." I'm not sure claim to the name makes sense in the spec definition is a valid claim, though.
It would be like requiring every author to specifically request official blessings to write about trademarked (registered or not) subjects. That'd be silly as it falls well within fair use of the name. The name "Standard" or to a lesser degree "Common" complicate ownership, certainly. I think I would have preferred the verb instead: "Standardized." Regardless, "Markdown" is the subject of the spec, not necessarily the product.
The latter implementations, however, probably shouldn't use the name Markdown in them at all if Gruber doesn't want them to use it. They really don't need to exist in the spec. They're just examples of valid interpreters. Spin them off and rename them, leaving the spec and tests.
What's clear to me in all of this is there is value in portable markdown that will parse the same across applications and services, whether we call it markdown or not.
The drama of it all is amusing, in any case.
I don't think many people actually use Gruber's perl code.
If he wants to protect the format, I suspect he'd need a patent.
I'm not a lawyer and also not especially familiar with the laws in the US, but my guess would be that legally, he might not have a case.
Of course there are also questions of morality, but who cares about that ;)
So? Even if the license is relevant to the legality of the use of the name, that has no bearing on whether or not the Common Markdown folks have assumed that Gruber's silence means consent -- they could simply disagree on the legal relevance of the license, and not see Gruber's consent as required.
Personally I think it is a fair compromise.
> We haven't heard back after replying last night, and I'm not sure we ever will, so in the interest of moving ahead and avoiding conflict, we're immediately renaming the project to Common Markdown.
I bet Gruber still won't be happy, but I consider this issue squashed.
Most importantly, it applies to the software (ie. the Perl script; or a compiled version of it) not the "name" or "invention" of Markdown. To own the name, he needs a trademark; to own the invention, a patent. Since Standard/Common Markdown isn't a derivative of the Perl script, the license itself probably doesn't apply.
If he does claim a trademark (registered or otherwise) he hasn't defended it at all for going on ten years now. It's really hard to imagine a court not finding it to be a generic trademark as with Kleenex or Aspirin.
I doubt very much he claims a patent, he's way past any grace period in which to apply for one subsequent to his initial disclosure.
This is one of those "ultimately, up to the courts"-things though. Gruber certainly has standing to bring suit if he wants to.
Disclaimer: I am a Stack Exchange employee. I have not been involved in any of the (now Common) Markdown standardization proceedings. I was aware that they were underway, having read Jeff's earlier blog posts.
That's arguable. More elaborate software licenses define terms like 'derivative work', but BSD-style licenses generally don't.
Do open specifications count as 'products derived from this software'? There's obviously no code being shared.
Legally, it's probably more of a trademark issue, and trademarks can be lost, in particular if they are not enforced and lose their distinctiveness.
"Committee-driven Markdown" might have worked :).
"Maarkdown: the extra 'a' is for 'actively maintained'."
"Marrkdown: the extra 'r' is for 're-specified'."
"Mnarkdown: the silent 'n' is a mnemonic for 'non-ambiguous'."
- then we wrote him and waited for 2... weeks!
- we got no response so we went ahead... and he was mad
- we wrote back... and waited A. Whole. Day.
- we got no response, so we are going ahead...
- what could possibly go wrong?!
Even in the podcast he mentions an (serious and lucrative) offer for his @markdown twitter account, instead of answering he actively chooses not to.
He mentions the ongoing discussion on HIS mailing list which he read has a opinion about, but chooses not to respond.
No reply to my important email. That warrants a phone call in my book?
Email is convenient, but it may not be optimum all the time.
I'm down with the idea of developers getting together and forming a common standard for Markdown implementations if they want to do so, but Atwood & Company have consciously and deliberately thumbed their nose at Gruber through this whole process. They could have just called it "Plain Text Markup" and explained in the first paragraph that yes, it's Markdown with all the ambiguities taken out. Hell, they could have called it "PTM: The Standardized Markdown Specification." They could have even called it "Pandoc-Flavored Markdown," which AFAICT is (mostly) what it is. But "Standard Markdown" came across as we are taking control of Markdown over your objections and the way they developed and announced it greatly amplifies that reading. I'm not convinced "Common Markdown" is much of an improvement, and the "Well, we're pretty sure this will make John happy even though we didn't actually wait for his response" definitely doesn't help.
I would guess the answer to be "Release it anyway", because Gruber's blessing is not something that was considered a requirement.
Given the improvements, it's worth a little initial ambiguity, and given those are solid, that ambiguity won't endure very long.
Everybody has high happy potential, and it's up to them individually to actualize it.
The group has heavy backing, they could whip up parsers fairly quickly, and Markdown can be left in the dust where it's "creator" seems to want to leave it.
Github Flavored Markdown means “Gruber's thing, but with some GitHub things added”; and that's what it is.
Standard Markdown means “the main/real/most-widely-used Markdown”; but it's none of those things.
Common Markdown means almost exactly the same thing. If Standard Markdown is not okay, neither is Common Markdown.
Gruber suggested “Strict Markdown” or “Pedantic Markdown”. These names clearly describe how the project differs from Gruber's thing.
This has very little to do with whether the name contains the word “Markdown”. It's about semantics; describing what this thing is. Also, prematurely calling something Standard or Common is a classic mistake.
A rose by any other name would certainly not be a rose to the casual reader. "Smakdown" (for example) would require a Google search to inform that reader. We'd loose 1 minute to see that "it's a new standard [ forked from | based on ] "Markdown by John Gruber".
Calling it a rose would mean reams of existing code that would generate errors on this new "Rose" input.
Names matter when they break something. But only until we learn the new one and write new code.
AsciiDoc is really close to Markdown, is well specified and has a lot of features that are missing from MD like tables and footnotes.
If you want to migrate, rename the .md files to .adoc and fix the links syntax. Github supports that format out of the box and http://asciidoctor.org/ also has browser extensions to do live rendering of your local files.
Sure, how about BTM? Does that stand for Better Than Markdown? No, not at all, it's just three random letters.
I'm a little amazed Gruber is so protective of "Markdown". It's a mess and it's been a mess for years. It's like meeting a guy who brags about designing the Ford Pinto gas tank, or being the comptroller at Enron.
GML -> SGML -> HTML -> XML
Gruber takes the word markup, takes a (slight) new spin on the name markup and and calls it the opposite of markup (markdown). He now owns. Gruber gets mad when someone wants to extend markdown to be a generalized/common/standard version of itself, as has happened many times in history, because the name isn't differentiated itself enough.
How about just changing it to:
pukram
markram
unmarkup
markforward
markback
markright
rightmark
markit
nwodkram
grandmarky
markymark
(Note: I think Common/Standard Markdown is just fine)
Sounds like a lot of bureaucracy just to avoid having others dilute a simple technology concept like "a certain flavour of plain-text markup".
[1] https://www.patentstyret.no/en/Trademarks/International-trad...
There's a few key things you need to have to properly apologize[1]:
- a detailed account of the situation
- acknowledgement of the hurt or damage done
- taking responsibility for the situation
- recognition of your role in the event
- a statement of regret
- asking for forgiveness
- a promise that it won't happen again
- a form of restitution whenever possible
Most of those things aren't there. And, most notably, Jeff spent the majority of this post explaining why he wasn't at fault. That may be a fair opinion, but keep your ego to yourself - don't post an apology if you don't mean it, and don't act like this fulfills Gruber's request just because you put it on the internet.
Furthermore, Gruber is right. He has a license on the name Markdown[2] - the name is not up for grabs. And the name "Standard Markdown" very directly implies that the rest of the "flavors" of Markdown are wrong. I would say "Common Markdown" is no better - it implies that all other flavors of Markdown are uncommon. If Jeff really had any intention of making things right, the least he could have done was wait more than a day to hear back from Gruber - it's not like this is really a time-sensitive matter.
No, he doesn't. He has copyright on something, and he provides licenses to that copyright material on certain conditions, which include the use of the name "Markdown". But if you're not using his copyright, you don't have to get permission from him, so what he thinks about your use of the term "Markdown" isn't legally relevant.
Not necessarily. He would have had a trademark on Markdown at some point (you don't even need to register a trademark to have one, IIRC, trademarks are established simply by use). So unless he's lost that trademark due to non-enforcement (which is a possibility) then what he thinks would matter if he felt the urge to litigate it.
But legalities aside, from a moral perspective, I believe that people have an obligation to consider the wishes of the person who created and named Markdown originally.
They are established by bona fide use as a trademark (a mark of origin of a specific product) in the ordinary course of commerce. Its not clear to me that Markdown was ever a trademark, and that if it was it hasn't been either abandoned (not using a mark in commerce can lose it) or lost through the term being allowed to become generic.
(http://standardmarkdown.com/)
At least that's obviously a different thing to Gruber's Markdown in a way that the other names were not.
Sounds like those are fighting words.
It is during times like this that creators, makers are driven to defenses like patents.
* Showdown Markdown
* Mutiny Markdown
* Post MarkdownEmbrace progress, don't condemn it.
And by original, I include the concept of using traditional ASCII markups. For instance, doing this (asterisks) for emphasis long preceded Markdown. As did _this_. As did -this- and various other ASCII markings. None of those are innovations of markdown, or are they inventions of John Gruber, and their intention is directly paralleled in HTML.
Beyond that...the link mechanism of Markdown is and always has been pretty weak, and outside of that it's pretty marginal grounds.
Markdown's kind of taking over from BBCode as a standard for non-html markup, especially as used in comment boxes. [Gruber's original post](http://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-flavored-markdown/) notes that the working group for Markdown II: The Markdownening included people from Github, StackExchange, and Reddit, which all use Markdown for formatting their comments.
So, would you rather standardize what's emerged as the standard, and have umpty-million comment boxes keep on working pretty much the same, or make Yet Another Standard that may indeed be superior but is used nowhere?
(Admittedly if the sites involved in this decided to switch to New Lightweight Markup Language at once they'd probably change the habits of a ton of people pretty quicky.)
You mean Atwood's.
There's a name and namespace collision that is causing enormous ill will. Further, as much as it's a "standard" it's a half-baked standard on most sites, many simply utilizing what people already traditionally did for ASCII decoration.
(See http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/butt-head-astronomer.ht... if you don't get the reference)
BHB doesn't have quite the right ring to it, and he's not much of a blogger either.
He's the Paris Hilton of the tech world. Well, that's not fair to Paris Hilton whose much more of an entrepreneur. But what would you have called her profession when she was merely famous for being famous?