John Gruber’s Markdown writing syntax has exploded in popularity recently, although Gruber hasn’t done much with it for many years. Other developers have expanded on its original capabilities, to include Fletcher Penny’s MultiMarkdown.

Jeff Atwood would like an official Markdown standard to unify the disparate implementations and parsers and fix some outstanding bugs. He would like Gruber’s buy-in to his plan, but he may not have handled that so well. And Gruber doesn’t seem all that interested in participating. Color me surprised.

Macdrifter thinks the answer already exists with MultiMarkdown.

The comments in this Hacker News thread are instructive as well.

I’m curious to see where this goes.