# Welcome to CommonMark Discussion

**URL:** <https://talk.commonmark.org/t/welcome-to-commonmark-discussion/8>\
**Category:** Uncategorized\
**Created:** [August 18, 2014, 7:54am UTC](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/welcome-to-commonmark-discussion/8 "2014-08-18T07:54:29Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![system](https://talk.commonmark.org/uploads/default/original/2X/6/65d5254a09786b1bb8c19ad9c8e2285bffef558a.png) [@system](https://talk.commonmark.org/u/system)\
**Post date:** [August 18, 2014, 7:54am UTC](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/welcome-to-commonmark-discussion/8/1 "2014-08-18T07:54:29Z")

</div>

Markdown is a plain text format for writing structured documents. CommonMark, is a strongly defined, highly compatible specification of Markdown, along with a suite of comprehensive tests to validate implementations.

This site is for

- discussing the [proposed CommonMark specification](http://spec.commonmark.org) and [C and JavaScript reference implementations](http://code.commonmark.org)
- suggesting improvements to the spec and embedded tests, and the reference implementations.
- sharing information on CommonMark implementations in any programming language

We believe a complete, unambiguous CommonMark specification will promote adoption of Markdown and ensure that Markdown documents continue to render reliably in the future on every platform.

This effort was undertaken by:

> **John MacFarlane** , [jgm@berkeley.edu](mailto:jgm@berkeley.edu)  
> **David Greenspan** , [david@meteor.com](mailto:david@meteor.com)  
> **Vicent Marti** , [vicent@github.com](mailto:vicent@github.com)  
> **Neil Williams** , [neil@reddit.com](mailto:neil@reddit.com)  
> **Benjamin Dumke-von der Ehe** , [ben@stackexchange.com](mailto:ben@stackexchange.com)  
> **Jeff Atwood** , [jatwood@codinghorror.com](mailto:jatwood@codinghorror.com)

With the lion’s share of the spec and implementation by John.