What is the canonical implementation of markdown?

Question

The problem with writing my own Markdown parser in Clojure is that Markdown is not a well-specified language. There is no \"official\" grammar, just an informal \

Answer 1

The CommonMark project attempts to address some of the issues of the Markdown specification, in particular some ambiguities. It comes with a reference implementation, but that's obviously just the reference implementation for CommonMark, not for Markdown in general. It may become the de-facto standard in years to come, since some major users are involved in that project, but it might as well become just another dialect among many, in which case the reference implementation would add little value.

Answer 2

I believe Gruber's is the original and sort-of-canonical (see, for example, his 'Introducing Markdown'), and then people have extended it from there. I think some extensions are more common than others though, so it's probably worth seeing what a few well-used packages have over his original.