4 ms·
Sure, 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 w
by yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
Sure, 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.