forum.dlang.org, version 2 (BETA)

[Vladimir Panteleev via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 09:16:30 UTC, sigod wrote:
> How about markdown support? It can have completely client-side 
> implementation.

I have thought for a long time about this.

It's tricky.

There are multiple concerns:

1. People receiving messages through NNTP/mailing lists will not 
see the formatted Markdown. Although Markdown's goal is to be 
readable in its plain text source code, it still allows many 
situations in which the source is misleading or difficult to 
understand. For example, special characters need to be escaped by 
a backslash, which can create confusion in the presence of other 
special characters. (Are they part of the D syntax the user is 
describing, or something else?) Some syntax such as tables or 
images can also be not very readable in source form.

2. How should we render messages sent by NNTP/mailing-list users? 
Do we just assume that they're sending Markdown and render it as 
such? This can cause the messages to appear broken to forum 
users. Or do we only render Markdown if the post was sent from 
the forum? This means that when NNTP/ML users quote forum users' 
text it will be shown as plain text.

3. There is no unified standard for Markdown. The original format 
is not used on major sites today - StackOverflow and GitHub 
extend the format, and users will expect Markdown with those 
extensions.

4. Markdown's formatting for code (leading whitespace) is rather 
cumbersome, and difficult to use without either visual JavaScript 
text editors (as on SO) or Markdown extensions (as on GH).

5. You can't edit posts once sent. This means that if you 
accidentally messed up the formatting (e.g. you pasted code 
without padding it with whitespace or surrounding it in ```...``` 
blocks), you can't go back and edit it now.

You see this all the time on StackOverflow (even though it's 
user-editable) and more importantly on the vibe.d forums. It's 
pretty ugly, and in some cases, borderline unreadable (any 
indented lines are shown drastically different from unindented 
lines).

6. How do we encode that the message is in Markdown in the 
message's headers? "text/plain" + a proprietary header would be 
lying. "text/markdown" or something like that will likely cause 
the message to not be displayed at all in some readers. Sending a 
"text/html" part with rendered Markdown is an idea, but it also 
invites clients to send a "text/html"-only reply, which DFeed 
can't display.

To sum it up, it's a can of worms, and I'm fairly sure we're 
doing quite well without it.