How would one go about taking a project with a large corpus of non-standard markdown (e.g. Github, Reddit) and converting it to any standardized form, assuming that a standard is chosen that is not 100% backwards-compatible with all existing markdown flavors?
I don't think such a thing is feasible. I also don't think it's feasible for any proposed standard to simply look at the largest users and say "okay, we'll accept the idiosyncratic extensions of all of these differing flavors in an unambiguous way."
So assuming this pushes forward, there are (to my mind) two possible outcomes:
1) A backwards-incompatible standard emerges. No existing project adopts it, but new projects do. It gains legitimacy only once Github, Reddit, et al fade into obscurity.
2) A backwards-compatible standard emerges. Every large existing project adopts it, but the standard is so full of cruft and TIMTOWTDI that in ten years it gets usurped entirely by a challenger that emphasizes simplicity.
For Reddit, I would use the new parser for comments written after the upgrade and the old parser for comments written before the upgrade. Note that Reddit already puts post that are older then a month or so into a "frozen" archive mode where they can not be further modified, so after a month the old parser could be thrown away completely.
I don't think such a thing is feasible. I also don't think it's feasible for any proposed standard to simply look at the largest users and say "okay, we'll accept the idiosyncratic extensions of all of these differing flavors in an unambiguous way."
So assuming this pushes forward, there are (to my mind) two possible outcomes:
1) A backwards-incompatible standard emerges. No existing project adopts it, but new projects do. It gains legitimacy only once Github, Reddit, et al fade into obscurity.
2) A backwards-compatible standard emerges. Every large existing project adopts it, but the standard is so full of cruft and TIMTOWTDI that in ten years it gets usurped entirely by a challenger that emphasizes simplicity.