Why is stdio ... stdio?

[Chris Katko]

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.