fletcher
commented
10 years ago CommonMark (originally "Standard Markdown") is a great piece of marketing -- name something as if it's the new official standard, and a lot of people will believe that it is.
CommonMark is two things, that should be separated:
1) An attempt to smooth over Markdown's edge cases that lead to variations in behavior amongst Markdown implementations.
2) An attempt to define which extensions to Markdown should somehow be considered more "standard" than the extensions already in place by much older Markdown variants.
Item 1 is a great idea, item 2 not so much.
IMO, for CommonMark to be considered useful, there need to be an easy way to separate the two goals. I have no problem trying to better identify edge cases that should clearly be fixed. For example, when looking at the CommonMark test suite, I was able to find a few issues with whitespace that were easily fixed in MultiMarkdown.
However, trying to find these test items is difficult due to the vast number of "failed" tests that result from CommonMark using its own "non-standard" behaviors.
I have asked for improvements to the CommonMark test suite to make it useful for Markdown developers who don't buy into the CommonMark philosophy re: extensions, but do agree that there are edge cases that can be improved. We'll see if that happens.
iandol
Commonmark, led by John MacFarlane, appears to be gaining some recognition for trying to standardise markdown: http://commonmark.org
and appears to make new implementations much easier to develop: https://github.com/jonschlinkert/remarkable
I was wondering if choosing to follow commonmark when it gets to V1.0 in its standard implementation would be beneficial for MMD?