Re: http://www.elkarte.net/index.php?topic=134.msg1518#msg1518
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...
/me edits.
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 (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/the-future-of-markdown.html) 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 ;)
/me tests another quick-edit.
Test:
Dunno, seems to work as usual.
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...
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.
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!)
Spuds, didn't you add something hidden somewhere?
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)
Oh, right!