The project is no called longer "Common Markdown". It's CommonMark [1].
From Atwood's announcement yesterday:
Edit: after a long and thoughtful email from John Gruber – which is greatly appreciated – he indicated that no form of the word "Markdown" is acceptable to him in this case. We are now using the name CommonMark. [2]
Anyway, the reason the specification is complicated is because creating a regular grammar from a rich irregular grammar requires a lot of work. Things like reading ahead to distinguish between:
paragraph 1
%%%
paragraph 2
and
paragraph 1
---
paragraph 2
The goal is to help companies like StackExchange and Github get out of the markup language business by solving a set problems that aren't really on the radar of individual bloggers using markdown, but that very much impact websites at scale.
The article is a case in point - StackOverflow can't be efficient if it's pushing an entire parser into the browser. It needs to degrade gracefully when javascript is off.
In general, the world will be better off when the canonical markdown documentation is not written with a tiny font on a grey background. Perhaps we'll even see markdown [or CommonMark] begin replacing RTF and BBCode more places.
From Atwood's announcement yesterday:
Edit: after a long and thoughtful email from John Gruber – which is greatly appreciated – he indicated that no form of the word "Markdown" is acceptable to him in this case. We are now using the name CommonMark. [2]
Anyway, the reason the specification is complicated is because creating a regular grammar from a rich irregular grammar requires a lot of work. Things like reading ahead to distinguish between:
and The goal is to help companies like StackExchange and Github get out of the markup language business by solving a set problems that aren't really on the radar of individual bloggers using markdown, but that very much impact websites at scale.The article is a case in point - StackOverflow can't be efficient if it's pushing an entire parser into the browser. It needs to degrade gracefully when javascript is off.
In general, the world will be better off when the canonical markdown documentation is not written with a tiny font on a grey background. Perhaps we'll even see markdown [or CommonMark] begin replacing RTF and BBCode more places.
[1]: http://commonmark.org/
[2]: http://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-common...