Microsoft Considered Harmful

[VERIFIED] Last updated by Joe Schaefer on Sat, 23 May 2026    source

 

Markdown’s Origins

The point of John Gruber’s Markdown syntax spec was that it was easy to work with; not just from an authoring standpoint, but from an implementer’s perspective as well. $\LaTeX$, MathML, and HTML5 are not that.

GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM)

GFM stayed true to that specification’s design goals right up until Microsoft bastardized the isolated dollar sign to convert it into a $\LaTeX$ sigil because of some antiquated, ugly crapware called MathJax that had nothing to do with Markdown, and the fact that these assholes don’t want to promote $\KaTeX$ without a bribe from the Khan Academy.

Embrace and Extend Redux

Of course this was entirely intentional, because world-class engineering teams had settled on $\KaTeX$ with double-dollar token boundaries for inline math, and fenced math blocks for block $\KaTeX$ processing before 2020.

It is now an ambiguous disaster of engineering regex defects every time an author/implementer has to guess what the parser is supposed to do with sequences of isolated dollar signs occurring within a single paragraph of markdown prose.

Most disgustingly, the embrace and extend evil empire has an army of F/OSS free labor slaves to serve as syncophantic thought police about their efforts to pilfer the labor of others for their own market gains via AI.

Fuck Microsoft

Long story shot, GFM is no longer an industry spec, but a proprietary vendor format no different from the Wikimedia garbage they copied it from.

Orion does not, and will never, use newer GFM parsers that pretend to track this dirty misfeature.

Instead, we rely on an internal fork of @markedjs/marked and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.