Github, Reddit and StackExchange offer standard Markdown syntax

Markdown Markup Language was developed in 2004 by John Gruber and Aaron Schwartz. Markdown Philosophy - write text that is easy to read and at the same time automatically converted to plain HTML. The authors immediately released and Perl parser, he quickly gained great popularity, and Markdown went to the masses.

Unfortunately, the generally accepted Markdown specification has not yet been adopted, which causes some confusion . The canonical description of Gruber does not give answers to all questions, as well as the code of the above-mentioned parser, which turned out to be slightly buggy. In many cases, it produces a clearly bad result. In general, the problem persists for 10 years.

A group of activists suggested their decision, which included John Macfarlane from the University of Berkeley (author of the Pandoc Markdown and the Babelmark test), representatives from Meteor, Github, Reddit, StackExchange and Discourse. For two years of working together, they agreed on “the most optimal syntax specifications” in the framework of the Standard Markdown project ( ). They also released a comprehensive test suite to test each Markdown implementation for compliance with specifications.

The project has good prospects, at least based on the composition of the participants. If all these sites switch to the same Markdown syntax, then it can really become a de facto standard, even without official specifications. In the end, nothing prevented Perl from developing successfully without them.
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It would seem that the initiative is commendable. However, John Gruber himself is somewhat outraged that outsiders call the next implementation of the syntax “standard”. There are more than two dozen implementations of syntax , and why should the 25th be suddenly called “standard” from the very beginning? In general, this is a classic situation that occurs very often in the IT world.



In addition, the W3C consortium some time ago created the Markdown Community Group , which should coordinate efforts to develop a single version of Markdown. The work and the release of “standard” specifications behind them are at least an indicator of some disrespect for those who have spent time and effort on this project.

Nevertheless, Meteor, Github, Reddit, StackExchange are sites that have a great influence on web developers. And if they agreed on a single syntax implementation, there is a good chance that many web developers will follow their example. And this is the most important thing. The authors of Standard Markdown say that after discussion with the community they are ready to release version 1.0, which can be considered "standard and unambiguous."

20+ Markdown syntax implementations can be compared with the help of the unofficial MDTest test .

Examples of the implementation of the parser on C99 and JavaScript and tests for compliance with specifications published on Github .

The very text of the Standard Markdown specifications itself, with more than 400 examples, is published here (source code: spec.txt ).

Judging by the first reviews in the community of web developers, another holivar is coming.