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For future consideration: markdown support

Re: http://www.elkarte.net/index.php?topic=134.msg1518#msg1518

Quote from: Arantor – The other thing about using IRC is that while it's great you're recording discussions, I don't exactly feel like I can jump in and add any comments.

For example the latest digests talk about dropping bbcode for a Markdown type construct. I guess in lieu of anywhere else, I'll add them here :P

While that's in principle a good idea, there is a greater issue than backwards compatibility, and it's been sort of touched on - custom code. This might not seem like a big deal but remember that even WordPress has 'shortcodes' which are essentially an analogue of bbcode, and they have a big ol' shiny WYSIWYG editor. I would also note that I always seemed to spend more time wrestling with that than I ever did with bbcode ;)

We talked about phasing out bbcode entirely at one point and relying solely on WYSIWYG but in our case we would drastically miss things like footnotes. Quotes would also be a little challenging if you wanted to link back to the poster. Shame because I'd quite like to do away with bbc parsing in some respects!

They are relevant issues, and I don't have the answers.
Nor do I foresee we'll have some answers till we reconsider and investigate, after 1.0 release or even much after. (or whenever one is in the mood to, but it's not for Elk 1.0.)

In simple daily use, personally I miss markdown support in forums. Example: lists. It's incredibly easier to just do:
stuff
 more stuff
than any other option, including WYSIWYG.
I guess the easiness is normal, markdown is simple text with conventions, translated to html.

Re: Wordpress. (taken as simple example)
Yes... importing/converting content from other to the other has its surprises and misses. :)
The content needs filtered, some converted, some/much custom bbc dropped (probably). It's different from exporting markdown text, exactly thanks to its plain-text simplicity. Dunno. Thinking that the way we do with emails, on one hand, and the rewrite of parse_bbc() on another, will help...


 TestMonkey edits.
Last Edit: February 28, 2013, 12:04:40 am by TestMonkey
The best moment for testing your PR is right after you merge it. Can't miss with that one.

Re: For future consideration: markdown support

Reply #1 –

QuoteIn simple daily use, personally I miss markdown support in forums. Example: lists. It's incredibly easier to just do:
stuff
 more stuff

Well... SMF did actually have a sort of substitute. It wasn't particularly stable and most people never knew about it - and I'll admit it's not quite as elegant

  • But there is implicit list support
  • By using *, o, and 0 in []
  • As the first character of the line

But it is a shade buggy.
EDIT: Did you guys fix something with it? When I pressed preview, the [x] code was translated to li tags without a list container. As far as I remember, SMF wouldn't do that, it would just try to inline convert it at parse time into a list.

The other thing about Markdown is that even that isn't entirely consistent, it's something the Discourse (which I always want to write as Discourage for some reason hahahahahaha) guys talk about - Jeff's blog article about it, for example where it is discussed - just like bbcode, there's no actual specification to follow.

But I will say as much as I admire the simplicity of it too, there are certain bbcode you will have to pry from my cold, dead fingers - namely footnotes ;)


 TestMonkey tests another quick-edit.
Last Edit: February 27, 2013, 11:57:46 pm by TestMonkey

Re: For future consideration: markdown support

Reply #2 –

Quote from: Arantor – EDIT: Did you guys fix something with it? When I pressed preview, the [x] code was translated to li tags without a list container. As far as I remember, SMF wouldn't do that, it would just try to inline convert it at parse time into a list.
Test:
Dunno, seems to work as usual.

Quote from: Arantor – The other thing about Markdown is that even that isn't entirely consistent, it's something the Discourse (which I always want to write as Discourage for some reason hahahahahaha) guys talk about - Jeff's blog article about it, for example where it is discussed - just like bbcode, there's no actual specification to follow.
A while ago (about 6 months I'd say) someone on Twitter (from one of the other forum platforms, ATM don't remember exactly), proposed to "start" talking about harmonization of bbcode across scripts, but I didn't see a lot of activity in that direction...
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Re: For future consideration: markdown support

Reply #3 –

It's something I think we should harmonise, but it's trying to get a spec made, I could bug some other forum systems and get some on board.

If Elk went for it, perhaps Wedge would also be up for co-developing a free libbbcode? I imagine SM would probably go for it too, so we could have three to begin the party?

Edit: Bad examples, us three pretty much use the same code anyway.
Last Edit: February 28, 2013, 06:16:56 am by Trekkie101

Re: For future consideration: markdown support

Reply #4 –

Part of the problem is that we between us have the most expressive bbcode parser; vB (at least vB 3, and I see no reason for to have changed in later versions) never went beyond [tag=parameter]content[/tag]

I think we'd be up for it but note that we have already added some strangeness in our implementation, e.g. the footnote tag, which would probably have to be removed (as it's not really a normal tag!)

Re: For future consideration: markdown support

Reply #5 –

Spuds, didn't you add something hidden somewhere?
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Re: For future consideration: markdown support

Reply #6 –

Yes there is a markdown to html in the ext directory but we don't use it in posting (but could, maybe 1.1, maybe track a feature)


Now the post by email does uses that as a start, so should someone reply to a message with markdown it goes markdown ->html ->bbc


 For outbound messages (of PBE) it does a bbc->html->markdown so that what get sent looks better than just plain text (I chose not to send html on the outbound email, we can revisit that at some point but there is more than enough going on already) 

Re: For future consideration: markdown support

Reply #7 –

Oh, right!
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