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> Perhaps would have been willing to lend his name to something that was just a more formal definition of what he's already created (without the additional stuff that other implementations choose to add).

I would assume he wouldn't have been, because "ambiguity is a feature". He has explicitly spoken against any attempt to produce a clear specification of Markdown, so it seems highly unlikely.



To reply to myself:

I feel like it's not dissimilar to what happened with HTML. Mozilla and Opera tried to get the W3C to write a better spec and iterate on HTML in 2004, and the W3C membership voted against it… they then, with Apple, started their own organisation (the WHATWG) which wrote their own spec called "Web Applications 1.0" which was essentially a new HTML spec.




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