We’ve recently adopted CommonMark on our platform after a long period of time using a general Markdown input that was mostly CommonMark but not quite. Even now, we’ve needed to add additional support for “homegrown” Markdown for things that haven’t been formalized into CM. That said, one of the things I notice is that there are many long-standing discussions about how CM could implement one feature or another - for example, spoilers.
That discussion was started in 2014 and still doesn’t have a solution for what seems like (on the surface) to be a relatively simple format (as opposed to something like tables). In the time since, other platforms that use CM have created diverging solutions to how to create spoilers leaving the CM implementation solution muddier because, rather than 1-2 potential solutions to choose from, there are now several - which means, if CM chooses a standard, those variants will have to adjust and potentially annoy their users. There are similar discussions for things like tables, too, so this isn’t specifically about spoilers - and I’d guess there are some I’m not aware of.
So, my questions
- At what point does CM decide that a discussion has been going on long enough and opt to actually choose a standard for implementation and document it?
- Is there something I can do to help push a standard to be implemented (regardless of what that standard is)?
- Alternatively, is there a point where one should assume that there are too many diverging solutions that CM won’t create a standard?