+++ BrendanLong [Sep 05 14 18:18 ]:
John Gruber hasn’t “abandoned” Markdown. He just doesn’t want to add anything to the core language. I’d be supportive of names like Common Markdown or Standard Markdown if this was just about clarifying the standard, but you can see here that this isn’t standard Markdown – It’s Markdown with some extensions built in. It’s entirely reasonable that Gruber wants “standard Markdown” to be Markdown without any extensions.
I would, myself, be happy to strip it down to a minimal core, without these extensions, if it would bring Gruber on board.
From what I’ve seen, I don’t expect it would.