BBCode vs Markdown

submitted by fschmidt from (freedit.nabble.com)

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[–]trident765 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

Markdown can be annoying because often when you enter regular text it interprets it as formatting. For example, when I made this post, where I copy/pasted from a book:

https://old.reddit.com/r/BAYAN/comments/vsku1e/bayani_view_of_12_imams/if9qnp5/

it initially interpreted the carets (^) as superscripts, so I had to go through my post and escape them.

Also, markdown sometimes does this stupid autonumbering thing, where it changes numbers you typed into numbers that it thinks that you should have typed. For example:

I typed 3,4,5, but it renders it as 1,2,3 for some retarded reason.

With BBCode, all the automatic stuff is in tags so you won't get this annoying behavior without asking for it.

[–]fschmidt[S] 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

Modern scum discussing this subject:

https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/10/135513901704863131/

Of course they hate BBCode and love markdown. They never fail to love what is horrible and hate what is good.

I want to add a WYSIWYG editor so that moronic scum users won't have to deal with any of this. But now that BBCode is fading, editors aren't supporting it. I only found these:

https://www.sceditor.com/

https://wysibb.com/

They both suck, but I will look into them more. Most probably I will have to write my own WYSIWYG editor which is a nontrivial project. That's how it always goes - because everything sucks, I have to recreate everything.

[–]kyo 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Regarding markdown, the recent release of Go introduces a simplified subset of Markdown for comments, which avoids a lot of complexity and inconsistencies of Markdown.

I want to add a WYSIWYG editor so that moronic scum users won't have to deal with any of this.

Users do not have to deal with any of this without a WYSIWYG editor. Users can just write in plain text.

Maybe neither BBCode nor Markdown is needed. HackerNews have only four formatting rule:

  1. Blank lines separate paragraphs.
  2. Text surrounded by asterisks is italicized (use \* or ** to escape).
  3. Text after a blank line that is indented by two or more spaces is reproduced verbatim.
  4. Urls (with or without surrounding angle brackets become links.

And it works well. I even think the second rule is unnecessary. Someone can use *word* or _word_ to emphasize something, but the website do not need to render them in italics or bold, or try to guess if they should be rendered in italics or bold (for example, 2 * 3 should be left as is).