Cowpathing the Code

Coding Horror talks about The Future of Markdown

Markdown is asimple little humane markup languagebased on time-tested plain text conventions from the last 40 years of computing...

Unfortunately, it lacks a real specification, which makes creating a conforming implementation impossible.  So, the solution?  Take what works, smooth off the rough edges, and create a spec.

I want this new language – working name "Rockdown" – to be seen as Markdown with a spec, and therefore only deviate from Markdown's behavior in unobtrusive ways. It should basically be a replacement that paves over the problems and ambiguities in Markdown. I'm trying to draw a line between what behavior is important to preserve and what behavior isn't.

Reminds me a lot of the mostly apocryphal stories of cowpathing.