Vanilla Forums botches quoting w/perceived list items

MrC
MrC
Volunteer Moderator
edited September 2014 in Lounge

FYI: The quoted line below was posted as "7. This is a quoted step 7...", but Vanilla Forums converts the 7 into a 1, thinking it is a list item. Quoted text should probably not be munged or indented as a list this way.

  1. This is a quoted step 7, which will be changed by Vanilla Forums to list item 1.

I worked around it in another post by changing the period to a one dot leader character:

7․ This is a quoted step 7, which will be changed by Vanilla Forums to list item 1.

Comments

  • khad
    khad
    1Password Alumni

    There's certainly some arguments going on lately as to whether or not John Gruber has been a good steward of the Markdown project, but if his Markdown Web Dingus is canonical, then Vanilla is doing this the "right" way (despite how wrong it may seem):

    Perhaps a suggestion to move to a different flavor of Markdown is in order…?

  • MrC
    MrC
    Volunteer Moderator
    edited September 2014

    I don't know enough about how inter-operable the Markdown implementations are, but this one stinks. :-) See this post:

    https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/comment/143684/#Comment_143684

    and look how it borks my Code entry with the goofy highlighting. And a message I sent to @sjk today with a second paragraph in an numbered list containing 4 items restarting list item numbering (so my reply had items 1 to 3, and then another item 1 shortly thereafter.

  • charlie98
    charlie98
    Community Member

    Wikipedia states this regarding the state of markdown. IMO use of Markdown will lead to forum issues regarding future compatibility not only within Vanilla but also if a different forum provider is selected.

    Standardization[edit]
    There is no clearly defined Markdown standard, apart from the original writeup and implementation by John Gruber, which some consider to be abandonware.[14][15] This has led to fragmentation as different vendors write their own variants of the language to correct flaws or add missing features.

    From 2012 through 2014, a group of people including Jeff Atwood launched what Atwood characterized as a standardization effort.[16] A community website now aims to "document various tools and resources available to document authors and developers, as well as implementors of the various markdown implementations".[17] In September 2014, Gruber objected to the usage of "Markdown" in the name of this effort and it was rebranded as a new dialect named "CommonMark".[18][19]

    A tool (named Babelmark2[20]) is also available to "[compare] the output of various implementations" to "promote discussion of how and whether certain vague aspects of the markdown spec should be clarified".[21] Gruber has argued that complete standardisation would be mistaken: "Different sites (and people) have different needs. No one syntax would make all happy."[22]

    A standards effort for the Internet media type text/markdown (independent of the syntax) is underway in the IETF. The Internet-Draft, draft-ietf-appsawg-text-markdown, is planned to be submitted to the IESG in April 2015. The Markdown community is invited to submit use cases for Markdown, which will inform the media type standardization process.

  • khad
    khad
    1Password Alumni
    edited September 2014

    @charlie98, that's exactly what I meant in my reply above. There is no "standard Markdown". I tend to agree with Gruber when he says, "Different sites (and people) have different needs. No one syntax would make all happy." GitHub flavored Markdown works great for GitHub, but other sites might want to have their own implementation.

    The core functionality is the same in pretty much all implementations, but there will be slight differences. Variety is the spice of life. :)

    For example, the syntax highlighting that Vanilla does is pretty great, but as @MrC mentioned, not everyone is a fan. ;)

  • MrC
    MrC
    Volunteer Moderator

    For example, the syntax highlighting that Vanilla does is pretty great, but as @MrC mentioned, not everyone is a fan.

    I love syntax highlighting, and use it all the time, but syntax highlight requires context, and the Markdown here doesn't have enough information or context to do this properly. So it seems to blindly apply styling (font and paragraph properties) based on the simple presence of Markdown meta-characters anywhere. Other forms of markup have ways of defeating this. There really needs to be a way to quote something and have it left alone entirely (that's the job of a quote, after all).

    Anyway...

  • RichardPayne
    RichardPayne
    Community Member
    edited September 2014

    For example, the syntax highlighting that Vanilla does is pretty great, but as @MrC mentioned, not everyone is a fan.

    Syntax highlighting is pretty irrelevant on this forum most of the time. Markdown is, in my opinion, a terrible mark up scheme for forums because it mangles text structure that is not written with it in mind.

  • khad
    khad
    1Password Alumni

    Noted. Thank you all for your feedback on this!

  • charlie98
    charlie98
    Community Member
    edited September 2014

    If you're looking for useful features the one I would like to see is tables. I think they are handy when producing nicely aligned data, even for posting in a forum. this markdown
    "| year | open | close |
    |--- |--- |--- |
    | 2013 | 2013-06-21 | 2013-09-23 |
    | 2014 | 2014-07-02 | 2014-09-21 |
    |2015 | | " may look like this

    | year | open | close |
    |--- |--- |--- |
    | 2013 | 2013-06-21 | 2013-09-23 |
    | 2014 | 2014-07-02 | 2014-09-21 |
    |2015 | |
    in this forum but in GHM it looks like this

This discussion has been closed.