I’m wondering if the authors and community are interested in publishing CommonMark in the RFC Series. This would make it easier for other formal specifications (e.g., from the IETF) to reference it.
Doing so should be pretty easy; there is a markdown-based toolchain for creating Internet-Drafts, so the amount of work to port the spec would be minimal. While you could take it to the IETF and start a Working Group or get an Area Director to sponsor the specification, that isn’t necessary to publish as an RFC; instead, you could take it to the Independent Stream which means that this community wouldn’t have to give up change control on the spec – and I suspect the Independent Stream Editor would be very interested in taking this spec on.
What do folks think? I’d be happy to help out if there’s interest.
Alas, I’m not part of the CommonMark community, but I think that publishing this as a RFC would be a good thing to do (tangentially, I would also like Internet Draft tooling to make use of the Common Mark variant of Markdown rather than less tightly specified alternative markdowns).
Taking it to the Independent stream would be one choice, but I think that it would also be interesting to consider whether a full IETF WG could also be formed to work on this.
For me, I think that the best thing of formally taking this to the IETF would be change CommonMark from an de facto standard into an actual industry standard, which may then help encourage further convergence on CommonMark within the broader industry, with all the benefits that go with it.
So, if there is any interest in this area, then I would also be happy to help.