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It supports https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
by gabrielsroka 2y ago
It supports
https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoSure, but that's it's own not-quite-markdown thing, which is extra annoying because it's just close enough that people think it is markdown and do things like writing code blocks with ```. IMHO it'd be much better to just actually do markdown, or at least a strict subset.
- oersted 2y agoOne of the best things about Markdown is that it is also a great plain text format for when rendering is not available. But I do agree that HN’s format should be a strict subset, it is so close.
- wholinator2 2y agoYeah but could it even be changed at this point? I'd imagine that once the ball gets rolling, changing any kind of formatting rules for a site with over a decades worth of (hundreds of thousands, tens of millions? ) of posts would be pretttty hard to get past committee
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoI would strongly favor writing a script that went through the database and rewrites existing comments from the old to new syntax; I believe in this case that's doable. And you would want to message it ahead of time of course. But with those things done I think it'd work fine, especially because I suspect virtually anyone who's gotten used to the HN formatting codes is already familiar with real markdown so it'd be a relatively painless transition.
- cubefox 2y agoSimple solution: apply the new formatting code only to new comments, that is, comments written after the date the new formatting was supported.
- cubefox 2y agoThat's only very limited support of the most basic forms of formatting. It's the year 2024, and Hacker News can't do better? Even the blog post above, from 2006, uses a LaTeX plugin.