Left and Right in the Internet
The IDG Campus Entrepreneurship Competition has concluded, and unexpectedly, I won first place. Now back in Hangzhou, I have some time to write down my thoughts.
Recently, a group of representatives from Stack Exchange, GitHub, Reddit, and other organizations initiated a project to standardize and enhance Markdown, named Standard Markdown. However, their efforts were met with opposition from Markdown's creator, John Gruber, who does not want Markdown to be used in other projects, leading to the renaming of the standardization project to CommonMark.
John Gruber believes that it is precisely the lack of any standards that has led to the current state of Markdown.
I think this is actually a clash between leftist and rightist thinking.
Let me give a few examples to compare left and right. Leftist thinking prefers grand and comprehensive plans, aiming for big achievements right from the start. Rightist thinking, on the other hand, likes to nurture a small sapling into a large tree, preferring to take small, steady steps. If a leftist has their wallet stolen, they blame society for not imprisoning such people; a rightist, however, blames themselves for being careless. Leftists believe the state should provide relief for the poor; rightists believe that the poor are poor because they do not work hard enough and deserve to starve.
If you ask me which side I support, I would say: "Balance."
The W3C organization is like a leftist entity, planning the standards for the Web and requiring browsers to implement them. However, it is evident that W3C's work is not always satisfactory; many drafts remain unfinalized, making it impossible for browsers to implement them. Yet, it is precisely organizations like W3C that have made the cross-platform nature of the Web possible.
On the other hand, standards without their own ecosystem are meaningless. CommonJS's acceptance is closely tied to the robustness of Node.js, which plays the role of a rightist practitioner, evolving rapidly.
Returning to the initial news, is the standardization of Markdown a good thing? Of course, it is a good thing, as it can promote the popularity of Markdown and allow new websites to quickly enjoy the benefits that Markdown brings. However, Markdown is a slowly growing open-source product, following a BSD-style license. If it is standardized by someone, it ceases to be Markdown and becomes CommonMark.
Meanwhile, the freedom-loving hackers can continue to hack, modify according to their wishes, and use the power of the community to let Markdown flourish.
No silver bullet, no magic cure; everything needs to find a perfect balance.