Flavored Markdown

[stuartpb]

Continuing the discussion from What changed in Standard Markdown?:

@stuartpb

@batjko

are you saying you’d prefer a formal extension system, as opposed to a centralized standard canon for all rules?

Semi-formal, yes (I’ll make a post about this in a bit).

Basically, I think implementations should write their own standards, written in the form of amendments to the core standard, that document their divergences with as much rigor and clarity as the main standard. This way, other implementations can copy the divergences of others (chjj/marked having an option to support all the features of GitHub Flavored Markdown, as an example), and even file bugs against the original implementation, pointing out where it diverges from the personal standard it describes.

I’ve started work on this as http://flavoredmarkdown.com - pull requests / issues can be listed on GitHub at GitHub - flmd/flmd.github.io: The Flavored Markdown variant repository.

Right now, I’ve included:

• The original loose Markdown specification (classified here as “gruber”, in the “K&R C”/“Thompson shell” tradition of naming loose original standards after their author)
• Standard Markdown (currently called “standard”, although that might be moved if this gets contentious enough - it would be better if an organization like IETF, ECMA, or ANSI could back it- think ANSI C)
• vfmd (another existing spec for Markdown)
• GitHub Flavored Markdown (nominally based on Gruber, we’ll see if that changes)

Right now, I’m just hyperlinking to each standard: the competing standards (Gruber, stmd, vfmd) can each have a separate and unrelated document with the exact specifications from upstream.

The goal is to have the derivative “flavors” (such as GFM) explicitly state what standard they’re basing their standard on, and to list the changes they make, for other implementations to copy, and for other flavors to themselves base their variations on.

[stuartpb]

Right now, the flavors are sorted alphabetically: GitHub Flavored Markdown comes first, followed by Gruber, then Standard and vfmd. That’s not really intentional, and more a side-effect of how I’ve initially organized them in Jekyll. I might redo this later with a manual ordering, or something like that: if anybody wants to contribute some way of sorting the flavors according to a value in their frontmatter, I’ll probably merge it.