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Recently, when I use github I met so many cases that I need to use markdown for my documents. Such as any wiki and GFM(github favored markdown), *.md files in github page base on jekyll, and just like writing here, etc. And I love writing documents by this syntax!
But all the markdown engines are different in many details: GFM doesn't support definition list syntax; maruku in jekyll doesn't support auto-generating ID of headers for TOC; kramdown, multimarkdown... and so on. Engines are also written in many languages like ruby, PHP, Java even more.
I found chaos in markdown world, just like I must write my CSS and JavaScript to support so many browsers for compatibility, not better, and even worse!
So I think of that like my title, if there is an official organization working for making markdown syntax to be standard, like W3C for web standard, the world in markdown would be better than ever!
Then anyone could submit their suggestion for new syntax to the ORG, and the ORG could review them and build a standard syntax criterion for developers. At that time, all the users like us could make less choice for which engines should use. And we can write once, use anywhere!
So comes my question, is there? or someone would like to create it?
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There's no standard test suite for Markdown; MDTest is the closest thing we have. The only way to resolve Markdown ambiguities and inconsistencies is Babelmark, which compares the output of 20+ implementations of Markdown against each other to see if a consensus emerges.
Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber and Aaron Swartz created Markdown in 2004 as a markup language that is appealing to human readers in its source code form.
Markdown is a lightweight markup language. It allows you to style a digital text document using typical formatting techniques: for example, headings, emphasis, lists, images, and links.
Markdown is an easy-to-read, easy-to-write syntax for formatting plain text. We've added some custom functionality to create GitHub Flavored Markdown, used to format prose and code across our site.
A community group has been created at W3C to create a specification for Markdown.
The current standard is generally seen as this however that has a different scope to the working group.
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The situation has changed since 2012 for the better!
CommonMark, which was originally intended to be aptly called “Standard Markdown”, formally specifies the syntax and semantics of the classic language, introducing several clarifications and some alterations from either the original prose or the reference implementation markdown.pl or both.
This specification may also document extensions in the future, but that’s clearly not the primary goal currently. Markua is another open specification which builds upon CommonMark but implements useful extensions from the start – it derives from Leanpub. The Pandoc documentation describes several common features of Pandoc, MultiMarkdown (MMD), PHP Markdown Extra and Github flavored Markdown (GFM), but not Maruku, Kramdown and other popular ones.
Babelmark is a web service by John MacFarlane that tries Markdown code with several engines, hosted and configured by their developers, and compares the resulting HTML.
A supplementary spec is Critic Markup which describes syntax for deletion, addition, highlighting and comments that can be used with a variety of simple markup languages.
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