> Even John Gruber, the creator of Markdown, is not a Markdown purist. Go look at the Markdown source of his blog and you will see that he frequently just uses raw HTML.
John Gruber is the worst possible authority to reference here. He’s a bad steward of the standard and Markdown is popular despite him, not because of him. His own implementation has bugs that will never be fixed, doesn’t support features we all take for granted as basic Markdown, and he refused to even acknowledge when someone wanted to make a proper standard out of it. If Markdown were left to him, none of us would be using it and would have come up with something inspired by it but probably better and without a myriad of competing implementations with different levels of support.
> Go look at the Markdown source of his blog and you will see that he frequently just uses raw HTML.
In situations where, if he used any parser other than his own stagnant code, the whole post could have been written in Markdown. For crying out loud, in the page you linked he has Markdown tables (which his parser does not support) inside HTML comments followed by HTML tables. Daring Fireball is a popular site, but it’s not an example of good design or content structuring. To this day it’s still annoying to read on mobile.
100% this -- we tried to work with JG to create and support a Markdown standard when we formalized "GitHub flavored Markdown" and got the exact opposite reaction many of us expected. Even using the name in any context was seen as a slight.
Dude created a simple tool based on email conventions of the time and released it to the world for free and it's still with us, used all over. And you're here crying that he didn't want to work with you? Did you think he was somehow obligated to? How incredibly entitled.
It's open source, so you do what you do. That's the good and bad of it. No one owes you a god damned thing.
I think you're missing much of the context and are misrepresenting what happened.
As far as I'm aware, there was no crying he didn't want to work with people, but there was a frustration that he was not open to having a Markdown "standard". To the point where he actively opposed efforts to standardize it, at least under the name Markdown[1].
This is legally and technically fine, as he owns a trademark for Markdown, but when you combine the inconsistent application of that trademark (GitHub Flavored Markdown is seemingly fine, but Common Markdown was not), along with him calling it "Jeff Atwood's crusade" and mocking the effort[2], it's not a great look and resulted in quite a few frustrated people.
As an open source project, you're right that he doesn't owe anything to anyone, but that doesn't mean people have to be entirely happy about how the situation was handled either.
But it’s not an open-source project. It’s a download link to a Perl script which is never updated and effectively no one uses.
There’s currently zero value to the code he wrote or the reference in his page. The only thing of worth that remains of his original implementation is the concept and the most basic syntax.
The point is Gruber was contacted out of courtesy, his name as the initial author carrying some weight in people's minds, and he reacted in an openly hostile and mocking way.
I listen to a few podcasts that Gruber is a friend of, but he’s always struck me as a bit vapid and haughty. He always seems to reference his own influence, which he seems to have earned by…coming up with a handful of basic text markup syntax and writing Apple hagiographies?
I always wondered why anybody would "support" or subscribe to the microblog of someone whose profession seems to be "write about Apple, mostly defending them". And not in any detailed long form, either.
I don't enjoy the fact that he's obviously biased and defends Apple too often, and occasionally shows his lack of technical understanding. But this man's job is writing and he writes better than 90% of blog posts posted on HN. And he has plenty of long form posts. His iPhone reviews are often longer than most tech journalists' reviews. I often disagree with the contents of his writing, but I do have a soft spot for people who wield language well.
Gruber also had a famously snotty reaction to Jeff Atwood (of coding horror, stackoverflow, Discourse and others) contacting him about standardizing markdown.
I won't rehash it here, it's been mentioned before both here and in Coding Horror (Atwood's blog)
John Gruber is the worst possible authority to reference here. He’s a bad steward of the standard and Markdown is popular despite him, not because of him. His own implementation has bugs that will never be fixed, doesn’t support features we all take for granted as basic Markdown, and he refused to even acknowledge when someone wanted to make a proper standard out of it. If Markdown were left to him, none of us would be using it and would have come up with something inspired by it but probably better and without a myriad of competing implementations with different levels of support.
> Go look at the Markdown source of his blog and you will see that he frequently just uses raw HTML.
In situations where, if he used any parser other than his own stagnant code, the whole post could have been written in Markdown. For crying out loud, in the page you linked he has Markdown tables (which his parser does not support) inside HTML comments followed by HTML tables. Daring Fireball is a popular site, but it’s not an example of good design or content structuring. To this day it’s still annoying to read on mobile.