If people are serious about this being a real, no-foolin’ standard, are there any plans to submit the spec to an actual standards body? Seems like the obvious thing to do, but I don’t see any mention of it on the front page.
(Granted, I’m not personally sure exactly which such group would be the appropriate one…ECMA perhaps?)
I too was surprised there’s no mention of this. I think the IETF might be an interesting choice to submit this as an RFC standard.
Last night I found these links:
but it looks like these are unrelated to the current Standard Markdown effort.
Devil’s advocate: What would that buy us?
The nice thing about a standard is that it gives people a fixed point to compare their implementation too. So just having a reasonable critical mass of stake holders who agree to use it provides the bulk of the value of a standard. Standards organizations resolve differences between various parties. Unless there are intractable conflicts, there’s no need to introduce a mediator.
Given Markdown’s history as a de facto standard, I think it makes more sense to formalize it from the bottom up rather than the top down, so to speak.
I agree with @jericson – not every well working “standard” has to come from IETF or W3C or ISO or ECMA or IEEE or ITU or … (But many a badly working standard does originate from such bodies.)
One crucial benefit of having the specification published by a standards body would be a unique, stable identifier to a fixed version of the specification. Given the naming confusion (standard/common/strict… Markdown/Mark…) an the possibility of changes, such unique identifier is important. I don’t mind if RFC number, W3C URL with date, DOI…