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+We need HTML, but we don't  ensuring that our sentences fall into paragraphs, our emphatic points are emphasized and our references are linked.  because writing 
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+The markup language that surrounds most of our words isn't part of those words. HTML has thankfully been relegated to the background. 
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+
+
+dG
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+Who should control Markdown? 
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+Who should control all the other tools?
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+Much of the the strength of 
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+John Gruber created it, and as Winer writes in arguing why he supports Gruber, "e owe a debt of gratitude to Gruber, for creating Markdown and doing such a great job of getting it established." 
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+ 
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+If the tools of our culture are controlled solely by those who make them, we always use them at the mercy of the tool makers. 
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+> that Gruber felt threatened.  I understand this.  He wants to be the
+> only one who gets to say what "Markdown" is.  Unfortunately, he has spent the
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+In the course of writing this I went from generally agreeing with Gruber to agreeing with 
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+Everything ends there
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+That's more or less where the story of Standard Markdown ends 
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+
+> In retrospect, maybe it wasn't well chosen.  But I don't think the name was
+> ever the real issue.  I posted the spec on markdown-discuss on August 14, with
+> the name "Standard Markdown" right at the top, and sent it to John Gruber for
+> comment, hoping he might get behind some (possibly modified) version of it.
+> Nobody said anything about the name then.  I think 
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+> last eight years not saying anything about what it is, even when implementers
+> on markdown-discuss were begging for clarification about various issues.  That
+> is one of the reasons we have so much fragmentation now.
+
+
+
+
+## What's in a Name
+
+
+
+This would be conjecture in many cases, but in this case Atwood has made no secret that he would like to be in charge of Markdown, in fact he's gone so far as to call Gruber a "bad father", of Markdown, which is, frankly, a little creepy even for a good old fashion developer fight. 
+
+Atwood created Stack Overflow so he's not just a little developer who's never had any legal advice before (if such a thing is even still possible in these copyright laced times), so Atwood knows that even when code is open source, project names are not.
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+If you don't think Atwood wants to control markdown, consider the other names he wanted to use:
+
+* Compatible Markdown
+* Regular Markdown
+* Community Markdown
+* Common Markdown
+* Uniform Markdown
+* Vanilla Markdown
+
+These are names designed to give your project a ring of authority that supersedes the origin. These are names designed to extinguish.
+
+Community Markdown is especially infuriating to everyone who has ever used Markdown and is not Jeff Atwood. As developer Dave Winer aptly [writes](http://discourse.codinghorror.com/t/standard-flavored-markdown/2382/19), "we all use Markdown, not just you and your pals. It isn't yours to do with as you please."
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+Sometimes it's useful to step back and reframe a question a bit, especially if you sympathize with the ostensible goals of Markdown. 
+
+Suppose you were a group of developers concerned about the future of the MySQL project under Oracle's leadership. You would probably start by forking the MySQL code base and then you would need to name your new project. Given that MySQL is a trademarked name of Oracle, you probably would not call your new project Standard MySQL. If you did you could expect to hear from Oracle's lawyers. A better choice would be to pick a name that has nothing to do with the source -- to forge your own identity. In the case of MySQL the fork is known as Maria DB and its well on its way to being more widely used than MySQL.
+
+We live where big tech companies are not shy about taking the things they want and destroying the things they don't like. This is what big companies do on the web. No one was better at this than Microsoft back in its heyday. The company even had a [catchy little phrase](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend_and_extinguish) for it -- embrace, extend, and extinguish. 
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+There are many reasons this happens but the two main ones familiar to developers are the not invented here syndrome and the desire of big companies to squash, buy or just bully out of existence smaller, similar projects.
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+Not invented here and embrace, extend and extinguish are why we have RDFa and Atom when RSS was working just fine. It's why there's Schema.org when Microformats was already there. Google has even demonstrated that you can do this internally, witness the new Activity Stream API when there's not only an external Activity Stream def, but an internal one.
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+This is precisely what a group of companies recently tried to do to Markdown.
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+The embrace step happened organically. As already noted, text fields the web over offer support for Markdown. Most of these text fields are controlled by large companies. Notably in this case, Stack Overflow, GitHub and Reddit.
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+The next step is extend. This also happened organically. Markdown is imperfect. There are edge cases where it fails. Then there are things it doesn't do. When people ported it to other languages they ran into these problems and often solved them in different ways. Gruber has only updated Markdown once, though there are some beta scripts floating around the web.
+
+So different version of Markdown sometimes do things in different way. This can be confusing sometimes. But that's the nature of forks, they build on, change and improve what came before. Yet, despite that, none of the forks has ever managed to gain the kind of popularity the original enjoys. Much of this is because the name belongs to the original.
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+There are only two conditions you need to adhere to when you make your own version of Markdown (which is licensed under a "BSD-style" license). Retain the copyright notice and refrain from calling your version Markdown or otherwise using the name Markdown in your project. 
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+The problem is that last bit makes it really hard to complete the third step: extinguish. 
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+Your project is never going to superceed the original because the original is only one called Markdown.
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+Remember too that Markdown has been around for 10 years at this point. It's in hundreds, possibly thousands of pieces of software, often behind the scenes, but often identified by name. In order to take over Markdown you need the name.
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+So, if you're Jeff Atwood, founder of Stack Overflow, and cohorts (which include developers from GitHub, Reddit and Meteor.com, you name your fork Standard Markdown. 
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+This the developer equivalent of [spitting in someone's face](https://twitter.com/justin/status/507304506007515136). 
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+In the case of Markdown, if you bothered to read the license you would know that using the word Markdown as part of your project requires explicit permission from the author. The web is waiting to see what happens when Standard Stack Overflow launches.
+
+## Why This Matters
+
+Eventually Atwood did back down. He half apologized to Gruber and changed the name to CommonMark, which will take its place alongside all the other Markdown forks. The big names failed to take over Markdown. 
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+There's an XKCD cartoon that nicely summarizes the future of CommonMark. 
+
+Most likely CommonMark will last about as long as the companies involved remain interested, which is to say, as long as it is useful to them. Most of the time  what happens is that the specific developers involved will move on to new companies and the company loses interest. The project dies.
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+Community driven projects don't necessarily last longer, but they're not prone to the whims of individual companies. The web is littered with examples of this, from Microformats which flourishes even as Schema.org (backed by the big search engines) languishes. RSS is still here and has become, without any input from big companies, a key part of the web's unseen plumping. 
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+Markdown now gets to join that list. 
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+That doesn't mean the gripes against Markdown are without merit though. It seems pretty obvious that Atwood and company want control of Markdown, but at least some of the problems they would like to solve are real problems.
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+They want to improve Markdown, solve some of the edge cases and make it easier for other developer to integrate it into their projects. They want to standardize it and, despite what I wrote earlier, standardization is often not a bad thing, which is why a lot of developers support Atwood and CommonMark.
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+There's another problem. Markdown has already shipped. Markdown is not a new thing. It's ten years old and used in countless pieces of software, most of which are never going to update just to make a spec that one group of programmers think is better.
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+Even if Standard Markdown solved all of Markdown's problems and all the problems it will ever have it's too late. Markdown is not Jeff Atwood's toy. It's not Github's, it's not Reddit's, it's not Stack Overflow's. It's not even Gruber's. 
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+Markdown is ours. At this point Markdown belongs to everyone who uses it. We are the web writers for whom it was intended and yes we have to deal with some inconsistencies, some vague blurriness around the edges you might say. The good news is it's just plain text, so even if markdown disappears entirely you'll still have something perfectly readable.
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+If we're going to spend 2 years fixing bugs and improving something, let's make it something more worthwhile, like OpenSSL. Markdown is doing just fine.
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+Markdown bills itself as "a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers". Notice the last two words, "web writers". That's you and me. Assuming you're getting ready to type a comment at the bottom of this article, and you probably are. We are web writers. Those two words will be important in a minute.
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+The hoopla over 
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+Because Atwood and the other big companies behind CommonMark have, as far as I can tell, neglected to put any sort of copyright protection on their name, I have forked the code on GitHub and started a project called Standard CommonMark. If you would like to join me, head on over to GitHub. Or don't, I won't be updating it.
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+That's not to say that standards are not a good thing. They can be a very good thing, but only when they're built from and for a community of end users. 
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+There's a reason the W3C, which oversees the standardization of HTML, CSS and other web technologies, requires stakeholders to give up copyright. Without that crucial thing, "standardization" is little more than a land grab, just another weapon in a big company's arsenal of tools to crush the competition. 
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+Fortunately for smaller developers, and the web at large, tactics like this rarely end up working, because the 
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+What happens though when a little Perl script written by one person becomes the focus of the ebrace extend extinguish attack? This is the story of a 1450 line Perl script named Markdown and it's adventures on the web.
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+
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+## Embrace
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+The programmer’s tendency to indulge their hyper-specced fantasies often produces inaccessibly myopic software that excludes the uninitiated - Sam Stephenson @sstephenson  https://twitter.com/sstephenson/status/507931444182667264
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+You can write in HTML. It's not that hard, 
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+There is a better way to do this. Many, many better ways in fact. One of those ways, perhaps the most popular of those ways is using something called Markdown. 
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+. To do that you would need to use it in your projects, use it on large sites so that the majority of users of the technology are your own. This way you will have a huge number of supporters when it comes time to sway public opinion. 
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+You will also have a clever, if meaningless, little counter argument to throw out when people protest that Markdown is doing just fine as is -- you'll be able to say that most of the users are only using it because *you* gave it to them. Man you sure are swell.
+