The inventor of markdown, John Gruber (yes that John Gruber of daringfireball fame) has always distanced himself from any efforts to make it a "standard" too, in part why we ended up with the name "CommonMark" for that project...

> https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

> https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...