Subject: Document Action: 'The text/markdown Media Type' to Informational RFC (draft-ietf-appsawg-text-markdown-12.txt)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2015 09:31:04 -0700

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'The text/markdown Media Type'
  (draft-ietf-appsawg-text-markdown-12.txt) as Informational RFC

This document is the product of the ART Area General Applications Working
Group.

The IESG contact persons are Ben Campbell, Barry Leiba and Alissa Cooper.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-appsawg-text-markdown/

Technical Summary

This document registers the text/markdown media type for use with
Markdown, a family of plain text formatting syntaxes that optionally
can be converted to formal markup languages such as HTML.

The working group has selected Informational status since the markdown
syntax was specified outside of the IETF, and RFC6838 does not require
Standards Track status for a document from the IETF stream registering
a media type.

Review and Consensus

The document had fairly active review within APPSAWG at first, but
suffered from some attrition along the way.  Feedback ranged from
"Why does the IETF need to do this?" to whether the entire work
(this plus the use-cases document) should appear in a single document
or in separate documents.  For the latter question, the split was done;
for the former, there are still one or two participants who are unclear
whether this media type or the registries created here will ever be used
by someone other than the author.

The author and chairs were implored to be sensitive to the markdown
community, which is external to the IETF.  The document shepherd is
satisfied that this was done as much as practical.

The author asserts that he and others have already begun to use the
media type in prototype form within open source and commercial products.

Personnel

Murray Kucherawy is the document shepherd.
Barry Leiba is the responsible Area Director.