Microsoft Considered Harmful - Iconoclasts
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Microsoft Considered Harmful
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Last updated by Joe Schaefer on Sat, 23 May 2026
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Markdown’s Origins<br>The point of John Gruber’s Markdown syntax was that it was easy to work with; not just from an authoring standpoint, but from an implementer’s perspective as well. LaTeX\LaTeXLATEX, MathML, and HTML5 are not that.
GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM)<br>GFM stayed true to that design goal right up until Microsoft bastardized the isolated dollar sign to convert it into a LaTeX\LaTeXLATEX 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\KaTeXKATEX without a bribe from the Khan Academy.
Embrace and Extend Redux<br>Of course this was entirely intentional, because world-class engineering teams had settled on KaTeX\KaTeXKATEX with double-dollar token boundaries for inline math, and fenced math blocks for block KaTeX\KaTeXKATEX 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<br>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.