On Wed, Dec 9, 2015 at 12:46 PM, Ken Fallon <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm amazed someone actually made it to the end.
I actually rather enjoyed the show--particularly Ken's rants about UI and the shownote discussion. Dave described something, which amounts to a strict subset of markdown--the features most commonly seen in plaintext: ordered lists, unordered lists, headings, paragraphs, etc. I don't really see this as a problem because we have to do the same thing when saying shownotes can be xhtml; the reality is we don't really want a contributor to throw arbitrary javascript in their shownotes even though it's valid xhtml. > Plain text is great but we do run into a problem when someone wants to > add even the most basic of formatting to it. > > Take for example his is a list > - Cow > - Dog > - Cat Valid markdown. > This is also a list > * Cow > * Dog > * Cat This too. > and so is this > > + Cow > + Dog > + Cat Also this one. > What leads to most work is when someone *doesn't* pick a standard. We > have had lots of examples where plain flowing text is mixed with html, > with pre-formatted text, with what looks like markdown. This can take > hours to sort out. > > So if there is any formatting in the text, it makes it a lot easier to > process if we pick a standard and use it correctly. But which of the > thousands, and what right do we have to dictate a standard to anyone ? I am a huge fan of markdown, but not everyone knows what it is. Additionally, there's the problem that there are a bevy of flavors of markdown. For something like this, my recommnedation would be [CommonMark](http://commonmark.org/), a formal spec put forward jointly by some of the biggest users of markdown. The best way to introduce it to users is to include some kind of live preview or dingus like the one at [commonmark.org](http://spec.commonmark.org/dingus/) and . I can understand the trepidation against imposing one view on the entire HPR community. My recommendation, therefore, is to let the community decide. The most open-ended would be to have something like a drop-down menu to select a format to use, with live-preview if available. For example: - markdown - xhtml - unformatted text - please help And if the list doesn't have someone's preferred format, all they need to do is provide a tool for converting it to xhtml. Now it's up to the mailing list to decide: are we ok with picking one or a few automateable formats to use on the upload form? _______________________________________________ Hpr mailing list [email protected] http://hackerpublicradio.org/mailman/listinfo/hpr_hackerpublicradio.org
