On Saturday, 10 November 2018 at 13:53:14 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
On Friday, 9 November 2018 at 09:11:37 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
No, I didn't. I just used underscores, which has been used
with plain text for emphasis for decades. Supporting markdown,
would involve stuff like backticks for code highlighting
Backticks are from ddoc. What's the other way to indicate a
code fragment?
markup for urls - stuff that doesn't actually provide
information to someone who's reading plain text but just gets
in the way
If the url is messy, it's already a mess. If it isn't, it's
easier to leave url as is than bother to markup it.
whereas the underscores _do_ provide information to someone
reading plain text.
I think what's really missing is code highlighting. Emphasis
isn't very useful, in your example the verb "do" is already
emphasis, so markup doesn't provide any additional information,
just gets in the way.
There is another possibility. Have the website run (fallible)
heuristics to detect a snippet of code and automatically generate
it. That would leave the mailing list people completely unchanged.
However, HOW fallible becomes a huge issue. It may be so well
implemented that nobody ever complains. Or, it could be so bad
that it often breaks up the author's post in ways the author
never planned--almost taking away the poster as the controller of
what they present.
That's a bit of an extreme, and unlikely, but I feel that
examining extremes can be helpful to define the potential domain
of the problem.
We can also easily have a checkmark next to each post that
disables highlighting for that post (as well as disable them in
your account settings), and even a button people could press that
says "this post is highlighted wrong." and the developer would
get a log with the code.
How many implementation "fixes" are needed depends on how
fallible the detection code really is.
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But, really, I don't personally see it being "that" bad for
people to put code tags / code markers around code. It's not like
they're going to be peppered everywhere. If you can ignore a
comment in code, you can ignore two tags (start and end) in a
single post.
It's an interesting argument to extend bold and italics...
because people ARE already using them!
But I never suggested we should support "full markdown". There's
no need to support an entire standard if your forum only needs
part of it. It seems like a reasonable compromise favoring
maximum utility, to support code tags, as well as tags people
already use like italics and bold.
Automatic URL linking is a feature of 99% of forums and that
would also have zero impact on the mailing list people.
There may be others. Even if the goal is "minimum changes for
mailing list people" it can still be done.
