Guber wrote a tool (with documentation) called Markdown. He generously permitted copying of these under a license making it clear that it was provided “as is”, and with explicit recognition of the fact its the implementation (not the language it parses) that’s called Markdown.
On the contrary, he makes it very clear that the language is called
Markdown. Quoting from http://daringfireball/projects/markdown/: “Thus, “Markdown” is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML.”
(And, though I don’t want to revisit this discussion, for the record, I don’t think there was ever any violation of his license, because neither our spec nor our implementations were derivative, in the relevant legal sense, from his work. But out of respect for his wishes I was happy to support the renaming.)
The CommonMark specification carries on for paragraphs, apparently criticizing the Markdown documentation for not being an unambiguous specification. Gruber never claimed the documentation to be unambigious, it’s more of a users guide.
And we don’t claim that he claimed it was unambiguous. We are just pointing to problems caused by the fact that it leaves many important things unspecified.
The tool however is unambigious, even though it’s written in a language that’s hard to read.
I don’t think even Gruber would claim that Markdown.pl is authoritative in cases where his syntax description fails to give guidance. If it is, then Markdown is a very weird syntax indeed. For example, it counts this as a nested ordered list, with ‘two’ a sublist of ‘one’:
1. one
2. two
Furthermore, more recent writings have continued this tone of blaming Gruber rather than acknowleding his contribution, e.g:
"And yes, Gruber has caused fragmentation "… “If he had exhibited leadership” … “then there would have been no need for this effort.”
All proper respect to John Gruber for his valuable contributions! But I think the statements here are plainly true, and they merely respond to your earlier claim that he is not responsible for fragmentation. He can certainly do what he wants with his project. If he is content with a loose description of the syntax, that’s fine. If he wants to let the garden grow as it will, without providing guidance to implementers who ask for it, that’s also fine. But it is a predictable result that a garden so tended will become untidy, that people will begin to trip on the weeds, and that there will be a call for a cleanup.
I am not responsible for the text on the website to which you object, but personally I’d have no problem revising it (and the spec) a bit. You have to remember that we have very limited time, and there have been more pressing things to work on.