h1. Markdown Wars - September 2014 Maybe this will be a new reality TV show. I'm glad that I have been writing in Textile, nearly every day since 2005. more. My Junco and Grebe codebases allow markup writing in Textile, MultiMarkdown, and some HTML. I've created my own flavor of Markdown/MultiMarkdown by adding some formatting commands that I want. And I've added custom, Textile-like formatting commands to both apps that are available, regardless of which markup is used. Old post about typing in plain-text, which has been my preferred way of typing for many years. bq. http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/markdown-the-syntax-you-probably-already-know/35295 br. When I worked at the BSBO and NFO, I got frustrated with apps like Microsoft Word when I created a lightly formatted text file. I disliked the way that Word would format my writing in unexpected ways. Many times, I had no idea how additional spacing appeared between lines. The fancy pants wordprocessor was way overblown for most of my needs, so I would use Notepad or a simple blog tool. I prefer to create plain text that gets formatted to HTML. I'm disinterested in Word and PDF files. h2. Old related posts GitHub's Markdown flavor: https://help.github.com/articles/github-flavored-markdown Markup language for screenwriters http://fountain.io/ 2009 post: http://blog.codinghorror.com/responsible-open-source-code-parenting/ 2012 post: http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-future-of-markdown/ Markdown test suite https://github.com/michelf/mdtest/ Markdown, Gruber, and Atwood discussion from a couple years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4716501 http://rumproarious.com/2012/10/29/markdown-the-spec/ h2. Sep 4, 2014 Hilarious. The geeks have crapped their pants. https://twitter.com/jcb/status/507532055618797568 q. wake up, log in to twitter, everyones pissed about markdown q.. I wonder if anyone got upset with MultiMarkdown, or did the creator of MultiMarkdown get permission to include "Markdown" in the name? http://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-flavored-markdown http://spinhalf.net/omg-markdown http://standardmarkdown.com http://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2 https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/507547724968128512 http://scripting.com/2014/09/04/letMarkdownBeMarkdown.html https://twitter.com/gruber/status/507590561172176897 https://twitter.com/horse_markdown http://discourse.codinghorror.com/t/standard-flavored-markdown/2382/16 http://talk.standardmarkdown.com/ https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/issues/3959 https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/507680549712838656 q. I apologize for any drama, I dislike drama, I like resolutions and forward progress. That is what I am aiming for. q.. http://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-common-markdown/ It's good to object and debate, but some of the A-list geeks needlessly wigged out. Verbal pissing matches occur in the Internet tubes. Sometimes, it's fun to be on the field participating, and other times, it's better to be a spectator. After reading through posts from the past to the current, I agree with Atwood's standard initiative, and I think that Marco and Gruber knee-jerked and behaved disappointingly. And the attempts at sarcastic humor were futile at best. It appears that Gruber has shown no interest in advancing the Markdown movement in this decade. Atwood has shown interest in improving and standardizing Markdown since 2007. The new markup initiative will continue, regardless what Gruber thinks because too many other intelligent people from popular web services want this to happen. Gruber can continue to write about Apple products while others continue to make it easy for people to write to the web. Markdown's Perl code looks much less professional than Textile's Perl code. Markdown needs a modern touch, regarding its development, standardization, testing, roadmap, etc. It needs to be a "real" project. What's wrong with that? It's 2014 not 2004. https://github.com/jgm/stmd h2. Sep 5, 2014 http://scripting.com/2014/09/05/emailToGruber.html Winer commented: q. Markdown is great, as-is. q.. For him, but not for me when I compare Markdown to Textile and MultiMarkdown. For some reason, these geeks overlook the main reason for Atwood's desire to standardize how Markdown is suppose to work. Atwood gave a simple example in his blog post: http://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-flavored-markdown/ q. Consider this simple Markdown example: q. # Hello there This is a paragraph. - one - two - three - four 1. pirate 2. ninja 3. zombie q.. Just for that, I count "fifteen different rendered outputs":http://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2/?text=%23+Hello+there%0A%0AThis+is+a+paragraph.%0A%0A-+one%0A-+two%0A-+three%0A-+four%0A%0A1.+pirate%0A2.+ninja%0A3.+zombie from 22 different Markdown parsers. q.. And the Perl module for Markdown "fouls up the formatting":http://jothut.com/cgi-bin/junco.pl/blogpost/43813/04Sep2014/Markdown-Testing when processing the above markup. I encounter this foul-up in my own Markdown typing, and it's annoying. But is this foul-up the proper way to format? I'm guessing not, but who knows for sure. 15 different rendered outputs from 22 Markdown parsers?? That's what the geeks need to focus on and quit wasting their brain cycles about parser names. More from Winer's Sep 5, 2014 "comment":http://scripting.com/2014/09/05/emailToGruber.html#comment-1575869945 q. I'm not going to read the piece about Atwood because I don't care. I used to think he was a pretty smart guy, and that maybe I'd like to work with him someday, but what I've seen now, I'm pretty sure I don't . q.. That's hilarious considering who wrote that. So Winer resorts to passive aggressive trash talking with his backhanded remark, "I used to think he was a pretty smart guy ..." So Atwood helps create StackOverflow / StackExchange. He helps create a modern message board in Discourse. He helped design a new keyboard in the past couple years. But Winer thinks that Atwood has lost his smarts. These guys are all infuriating and make me want to drop them from my reading list. They act like petulant children. They are so full of themselves sometimes. They also act authoritative as if what they say is the final word on the subject. They like to dish it out, but they cannot take it back. Long live Textile, at least the "Perl version,":http://search.cpan.org/~bchoate/Text-Textile/lib/Text/Textile.pm and whatever flavor of Markdown that I want to create. I wonder if Atwood helped popularize Markdown among geekdom because StackOverflow.com incorporated its version of Markdown. If StackOverflow had chosen Textile, would the markup world be different today? #writing - #markup - #markdown - #textile - #design - #blog_jr