The lack of official spec is really holding back markdown, I always find it grating when someone mentions that their site renders "Github Flavored Markdown". It should just be markdown. It would be great if Github didnt have this vendor lock in on markdown
"Vendor lock-in" implies that by choosing GitHub flavored markdown apps are somehow beholden to GitHub. Plenty of independent markdown parsers support GFM. Using GitHub flavored markdown is no more "locked in" than using the Airbnb style guide for JS is. It's just a convenient shorthand for "here are the conventions we use".
I'd argue the official spec is now https://commonmark.org/ - it was partially reversed from the actual implementations in use and their behaviours, and is very highly specific compared to the original guide.
