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?
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.