Looks like Jeff Atwood (@CodingHorror), John MacFarlane, David Greenspan of Meteor, and folks from StackExchange, Github and Reddit have put their money where their mouths are and released the first version of Standard Markdown at http://standardmarkdown.com.
I believe this will be the future of John Gruber’s (@daringfireball) Markdown.
Up until now, I have relied on Fletcher Penney’s (@multimarkdown) MultiMarkdown on the desktop for all my documents because of its consistency, ubiquity and wonderful extensions for writers (including tables and footnotes). I use rdiscount for this blog for the same reason (especially it’s speed).
I look forward to seeing Standard Markdown being integrated into these tools to remove inconsistencies, but rely too heavily on the extensions that are missing from Standard Markdown to consider a switch just yet.
I will, however, be watching the development of this very closely.
Update Sep 4th, 2014
It seems John Gruber, the creator of Markdown, was not in the loop on this:
@patrickrhone Like two weeks ago, I got one email. I was on vacation then; hadn’t yet responded.
— John Gruber (@gruber) September 4, 2014Not cool.
Knowing this now, I’ll wait to see if and how he responds first.
Follow the author as @hiltmon on Twitter.