The original upskirt markdown library, written by Natacha Porté[1], had a specific goal of separating the parsing of markdown and the generation of html. When github forked it, they apparently (according to Natacha's comments on her site) slowly added more and more logic which mingled and blurred the lines.

Now this article seems to be coming from a standpoint that separation of the two concerns is somehow novel. A bit odd to say the least. I think this is where the o.p. was deriving sarcasm.

Perhaps the real story is the separation of concerns in the ruby module wrapper, instead of at the c library level? I don't know.

[1]: http://fossil.instinctive.eu/libupskirt/index