CommonMark

CommonMark

Two years ago Jeff Atwood started to talk about The future of Markdown, and they he thought it should be. Jeff wants a standard Markdown, and he wanted that some of the biggest sites in the Internet to join together as a committee to create that standard.

Now, two years later, and two years working on a new implementation of Markdown, it is ready to go public. The problem, the name Markdown can not be used.

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. From licence

And John does not want to give Jeff any written permission to use the name. Jeff first named it Standard Markdown, and John said in an email that it was infuriating, according to this post. Now, it was renamed CommonMark.

I think is great to get something good and try to make it even better, that is the way Linux and GNU software improved over the years, in fact all Open Source software improve that way. But I do not understand why people get mad at John Grubber because he does not want it to be called Markdown, maybe he is wrong, maybe he is too pedantic but is his right.

Jeff did a good thing by changing the name and avoiding discussions, he may have done that in the very beginning.

Let’s see who is going to adopt this new standard version of Markdown, is GitHub going to do it? Are we going to be able to use it with Jekyll?

There is an awful lot to be done yet.