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> But it's much simpler than HTML. I don't know. Everybody knows HTML. It's pretty easy. > If people input with HTML then you're going to need to filter which

> But it's much simpler than HTML. I don't know. Everybody knows HTML. It's pretty easy. > If people input with HTML then you're going to need to filter which tags you do and don't want to pass through. That's a solved problem¹²³. > Markdown just gets rid of stuff like that. And you can only use a subset of HTML. I guess there are pros and cons. > Not to mention automatic paragraphing. ... ¹https://code.google.com/p/owasp-java-html-sanitizer/ https://code.google.com/p/owasp-java-html-sanitizer/ ²https://github.com/rgrove/sanitize https://github.com/rgrove/sanitize ³http://code.google.com/p/google-caja/wiki/JsHtmlSanitizer http://code.google.com/p/google-caja/wiki/JsHtmlSanitizer

DanBC 13y ago
You'd change your mind about "everybody knows HTML" if you say the HTML I produce. Little things like or , and browsers being very tolerant of appalling HTML, mean that a lot of people only sort of know HTML. I do wosh that BBCode or Markdown had better standards.
- patrickk 13y ago
 > You'd change your mind about "everybody knows HTML" ... Absolutely. You could've stopped there without any further caveats. The comment above I think is HN arrogance, assuming that the rest of the web is at a certain minimum level of tech literacy. So many people post facebook updates or online comments and don't what what HTML is. I know someone (relatively young, uses the internet daily) who doesn't know what a browser is. That aside, if given the choice, I would voluntarily use Markdown for comments all day long, no contest. For example a bullet/unordered list[1] needs so many awkward tags, whereas a Markdown list is much simpler, and much more intuitive for those who don't know HTML[2]. [1] http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_ul.asp http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_ul.asp [2] http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/6ewgt/reddit_markdown_primer_or_how_do_you_do_all_that/c03nik6 http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/6ewgt/reddit_mar...
 - VikingCoder 13y ago
 I honestly feel that "white-space: pre-wrap" would get you there for 99.9% of the internet, who never even use markdown. How about the other 0.1%? Well, why not a WYSIWYG editor (similar to that on Stack Overflow) that generates HTML? I mean, what are we, barbarians?! I'll note that the source to your Reddit article is 322 lines long! That'a lot to remember!
 - patrickk 13y ago
 Well for reddit comments, the vast majority of the comments I typically make will make use of quotes, bold, italics or lists (the comments that include markdown), I use stuff like tables quite infrequently. So even remembering a small subset of the markdown will make my comments much more readable. I learn the features I use regularly, from reading other comments, that's how I picked up markdown originally. I'm learning Python, I don't expect to learn all the features, hopefully I will learn a small subset, enough to be dangerous! > Well, why not a WYSIWYG editor (similar to that on Stack Overflow) that generates HTML? Absolutely, this is a good solution also. I personally like knowing the markdown features, I guess, but that's just me ;-) There is an extremely similar feature in the RES addon which allows live preview, not possible on a smaller screen though. It even includes a helpful list of markdown features for the newbie.

DanBC 13y ago

You'd change your mind about "everybody knows HTML" if you say the HTML I produce. Little things like or , and browsers being very tolerant of appalling HTML, mean that a lot of people only sort of know HTML. I do wosh that BBCode or Markdown had better standards.

patrickk 13y ago
> You'd change your mind about "everybody knows HTML" ... Absolutely. You could've stopped there without any further caveats. The comment above I think is HN arrogance, assuming that the rest of the web is at a certain minimum level of tech literacy. So many people post facebook updates or online comments and don't what what HTML is. I know someone (relatively young, uses the internet daily) who doesn't know what a browser is. That aside, if given the choice, I would voluntarily use Markdown for comments all day long, no contest. For example a bullet/unordered list[1] needs so many awkward tags, whereas a Markdown list is much simpler, and much more intuitive for those who don't know HTML[2]. [1] http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_ul.asp http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_ul.asp [2] http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/6ewgt/reddit_markdown_primer_or_how_do_you_do_all_that/c03nik6 http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/6ewgt/reddit_mar...
- VikingCoder 13y ago
  I honestly feel that "white-space: pre-wrap" would get you there for 99.9% of the internet, who never even use markdown. How about the other 0.1%? Well, why not a WYSIWYG editor (similar to that on Stack Overflow) that generates HTML? I mean, what are we, barbarians?! I'll note that the source to your Reddit article is 322 lines long! That'a lot to remember!
  - patrickk 13y ago
    Well for reddit comments, the vast majority of the comments I typically make will make use of quotes, bold, italics or lists (the comments that include markdown), I use stuff like tables quite infrequently. So even remembering a small subset of the markdown will make my comments much more readable. I learn the features I use regularly, from reading other comments, that's how I picked up markdown originally. I'm learning Python, I don't expect to learn all the features, hopefully I will learn a small subset, enough to be dangerous! > Well, why not a WYSIWYG editor (similar to that on Stack Overflow) that generates HTML? Absolutely, this is a good solution also. I personally like knowing the markdown features, I guess, but that's just me ;-) There is an extremely similar feature in the RES addon which allows live preview, not possible on a smaller screen though. It even includes a helpful list of markdown features for the newbie.