I'm not sure what point you're referring to that I'm missing. Here's my point:
People don't need to wait for Gruber to make a standard; Gruber doesn't hold enough power to prevent the adoption of a Markdown-like standard. The adoption of the standard will correlate with the value that it brings.
I am not saying the rest of the stuff you think that I am saying; I was just responding to your argument.
This initiative is obviously the right thing to do, or at least try to do.
I completely agree with this statement.
Feel free to impugn me. It is your right to; actually, it is your obligation to if the situation calls for it.
If consensus-building is one of the goals, then I would agree with you that Gruber's blessing is important. But one of the goals of Markdown is to provided easy-to-use markup for text. Whatever the next iteration of this looks like, I think that people will get on board if it provides a clear advantage over Markdown as it exists as well as other markup formats. With or without Our Dear BDFL's blessing.
Only geeks will complain about whether the successor of Markdown is deployed. Others, the majority of whom user-friendly markup is aimed at, won't care.
If enough people get behind this, it won't matter that Rockdown is a peer to Markdown. With good tools and support, Rockdown has the potential to exceed Markdown, even if it's just providing a better canonical parser and documentation since it's pretty clear from most of these comments that this is where Markdown is lacking.
Why get all angry at John Gruber? As many have already noted, he created Markdown for himself and released so that others could use it. AFAIK he didn't put any license/restrictions on it outside of calling himself BDFL. Whatever his skills as a programmer, writer, or his role as Mouthpiece of Apple, the vitriol is unnecessary (but absolutely fanscinating to watch). My panties bunch up naturally, no need to allow my feelings regarding Gruber to bunch them further.
Why get his approval? In the same spirit that Gruber created something for himself, you should just create something for yourself. I find it hard to believe that Gruber was the first person that conceived the idea of user-friendly text-markup. The new standard could just be inspired by Markdown and that would be a win-win: a respectful nod towards Gruber as well as the ability to move towards something 'better'.
