Regardless of how much I dislike Gruber's opinions on occasion, Jeff Atwood is completely steamrolling him here and I really feel for him; it isn't an accident that Jeff blogged about it instead of asking him privately. You do that when you don't care either way what the person says, and it's a completely dick move. As another commenter pointed out, there is no winning move for John Gruber here. That's so obvious that I can't even give Jeff the benefit of the doubt that he overlooked it.
This entire experience has left me with a bad taste in my mouth about Jeff Atwood -- I sure hope he doesn't set his sights on something useful that I've created for the world. You can make whatever argument you like about Gruber not "paying enough attention" to his creation, but Markdown doesn't really need to be "fixed" or "standardized". I look forward to the, undoubtedly, dozens of vendor-specific extensions that will be necessary in the final product and we'll end up right back at square one.
Really, really presumptuous and poor judgment. Invent your own stuff and let it stand on its merits rather than trading on Markdown's well-established name by force.
This entire experience has left me with a bad taste in my mouth about Jeff Atwood -- I sure hope he doesn't set his sights on something useful that I've created for the world. You can make whatever argument you like about Gruber not "paying enough attention" to his creation, but Markdown doesn't really need to be "fixed" or "standardized". I look forward to the, undoubtedly, dozens of vendor-specific extensions that will be necessary in the final product and we'll end up right back at square one.
Really, really presumptuous and poor judgment. Invent your own stuff and let it stand on its merits rather than trading on Markdown's well-established name by force.