Oh please, double standards like this disgust me. Microsoft had shit slung at it for years on end by the tech community because IE was terrible and held back innovation on the web, but no one claimed that IE is "not so terrible" just because everyone cared about it.
The difference with Gruber is that he's a darling of the tech community because he's Apple-anointed nobility. But as a programmer, in my eyes (and in the eyes of any other objective observers) he's absolute shit.
I didn't care that IE was terrible (until v3 or whenever), I cared that Microsoft went to all the major PC manufacturers and told them that their licensing deals were toast if they preloaded Netscape.
I didn't care that Word was a crappy word processor, I cared that they used their market position on office documents to make minor incompatibilities that prevented WordPerfect from interoperating.
I didn't care that Windows file sharing wasn't half as good as NFS, I care that they continually fucked with the SMB protocol so that no one could sell UNIX machines that could share with Windows networks.
It has been an absolute pleasure watching that Microsoft's power over device makers disappear. The world is better off for it, and Microsoft will always be an asshole in my book.
Abandoning basic etiquette that you should have learned in primary school and calling someone "absolute shit" is not cool.
Over those years it's grown in usage exponentially, and so has his fame as a sportswriter for team Apple. Throughout that period he's continued to brush off all kinds of attempts to clean up bugs, define ambiguous behavior, or fix the security vulnerabilities. It hasn't mattered what approach people have taken, he just does not give a shit. Here's an example from last week: http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/markdown-discuss/2012-Octo...
He's spent so long burning off any goodwill I would have for him on the matter, being cordial just isn't a priority anymore. NERD RAGE.
You're right: he just does not give a shit. I can see why. What possible upside could there be to engaging with someone who handles themselves like you are here?
Imagine that you're a mechanic working on a motor that uses the ProprietaryNew fastener (hex heads? so 20th century!). Unfortunately, the only ProprietaryNew wrenches are made out of cheap metal, and the sockets strip with regularity. You can't imagine saying a few nasty words about the parentage of everyone in ProprietaryNewCo?
From a comment on Twitter yesterday in response to someone, it doesn't seem that Gruber is particularly interested in engaging with this (though I may be wrong). If that is the case I suspect we'll see a forking of the project and we'll get to see whether a committee will do better.
It may well do - Jeff has a good track record at getting things done and is well respected and well liked - but personally I wouldn't put my mortgage on it because as well intentioned as these things are we all know how design by committee usually turns out.
Care to show us your alternative? It'll be on Github or GoogleCode, or maybe your personal blog, somewhere we can download it, try it out, and criticize it too, right?
Surely 8 years of rage is enough encouragement to write your own replacement for ~1000 odd lines of Perl?
Or by "enraged", did you mean "annoyed enough to write critical posts on random internet sites, but not motivated enough to spend an evening or two solving the problem myself"?
"NERD RAGE" indeed…
The real problem cannot be solved without some forward action on his part. He has refused over and over again.
Sure it can - you write something better, then get everybody who's already using Gruber's version or one of it's presumably also-flawed reimplementations to switch to yours. Or, is "8 years of enragement" really just keyboard-warrior-hyperbole on your part and an excuse to criticize someone who's achieved widespread adoption of some code you claim is 2nd rate, but which haven't bothered to improve or replace?
Besides, it sounds to me like David Greenspan has come up with a fine solution.
Being great at designing a format and writing code are two different things: one can be great at once while being terrible at the other.
It is a great format.
The original parser (and specification) has serious problems.
I think there's something to your post, but the tone makes me want to dismiss it. I know, stupid emotions.
This internet lynch mob mentality... I wonder how much this discourages people from releasing things. So, Gruber releases markdown.pl. People like it. People love it. People use it, people reuse it, people rewrite it. Next think you know, he's being insulted on the internet because he released something he wrote to serve his needs and not passing on some sort of figurative mantle or blessing.