The story of Zensical and Markdown - Or how not to handle existing standards

Their public actions¶

They followed up with an announcement, making it crystal clear that they have no intention to play by the rules (legally or socially).

Well that's how it works. You can use any means you deem fit and break any rules you dislike to push your own goals - until you hit someone more powerful to keep you in check. If you are lucky, that never happens.

To everyone using and testing Zensical Studio — we're very interested in your constructive feedback, good or bad! If Studio interferes with your existing Markdown workflow, please open an issue. We can fix what we know about, but we can't know every workflow and every extension combination out there.

We're also working on bringing a formatter and linter that truly understands Python Markdown into Studio. We think these will be genuinely high-value additions, as existing Markdown formatters like Prettier do not properly handle Python Markdown, as you may know.

It seems pretty obvious that Zensical has chosen this path. Create as much traction as possible for the own project by any means. Infringing intellectual property, misusing trademarks, misleading people, making false claims against other products, ...

Where does it lead?¶

Well, chances are this behavior pays off. If you are coming from the MkDocs universe and your notes and technical documentation is tied / hardwired to the hundreds or thousands of small Python modules used to tweak your rendering, you will likely benefit from it and should encourage them as much as you can. No irony, I mean it, others loss is your gain here.

For anyone else looking for a "portable" way of authoring their content following a standard, without the risks of locking that content behind the tools of a specific vendor, group, framework or language, stay clear.

Or to make it even more clear:

If you are thinking "Markdown" because you want future proof compatibility and simplicity, the unlimited stacking of modules and extensions that happens in the context of rendering "Markdown" with Python is the worst possible solution.
If you are thinking "Python" because the seemingly unlimited possibilities of tweaking your rendering output to your liking and specific use case, "Markdown" is no longer a relevant limitation / requirement to your solution. That allows to even look for many other advanced solutions,