On Saturday, 10 November 2018 at 18:47:19 UTC, Chris Katko wrote:
> On Saturday, 10 November 2018 at 13:53:14 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
>> [...]
>
> There is another possibility. Have the website run (fallible) heuristics to detect a snippet of code and automatically generate it. That would leave the mailing list people completely unchanged.
>
> [...]

Simply using markup convention used in stackoverflow and reddit of formatting as code when indented by 4 blanks would already be a good step forward. I do it now even on newsgroup like comp.lang.c, the only newsgroup I still use via thunderbird (yeah, for the D groups I prefer the web interface which is really that good, contrary to all other web based newsgroup reader I ever saw).


>
> [...]

On Saturday, November 10, 2018 6:53:14 AM MST Kagamin via Digitalmars-d- learn wrote:
> On Friday, 9 November 2018 at 09:11:37 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
>
> wrote:
> > No, I didn't. I just used underscores, which has been used with plain text for emphasis for decades. Supporting markdown, would involve stuff like backticks for code highlighting

Backticks are not from ddoc. They're from markdown and only got added to ddoc later. The fact that they got added to ddoc just further degrades it as a proper, macro-based markup language. Regardless, if it isn't clear that something is code, just put it on its own line, just like folks have been doing in mailing lists and newsgroups for decades.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Saturday, 10 November 2018 at 23:29:12 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> The fact that they got added to ddoc just further degrades it as a proper, macro-based markup language.

The backticks were added to ddoc because they enabled something that was *virtually impossible* in ddoc before - proper character escaping. It actually originally had nothing to do with syntax sugar nor even with presentation - just the constant repetition of that myth has made it into a bit of reality.

On the forum though, characters are already escaped properly, so there's no need here. Syntax highlighting for larger blocks is something I'm meh on - I don't really care either way if we wanted to do it.

On Saturday, November 10, 2018 7:51:36 PM MST Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars- d-learn wrote:
> On Saturday, 10 November 2018 at 23:29:12 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
>
> wrote:
> > The fact that they got added to ddoc just further degrades it as a proper, macro-based markup language.
>
> The backticks were added to ddoc because they enabled something that was *virtually impossible* in ddoc before - proper character escaping. It actually originally had nothing to do with syntax sugar nor even with presentation - just the constant repetition of that myth has made it into a bit of reality.

It may be that a feature was needed to do better character escaping, but backticks really don't fit in with ddoc as a whole, and they've only encouraged folks to try and add further markdown features to ddoc, which IMHO, is incredibly negative. On the whole, the worst features of ddoc are the ones that act least like macros. They're the ones that are most "magical" and the ones that generally have to be fought and worked around. Adding more markdown features just makes things worse. As such, I very much wish that we'd found a different way to fix the character escaping problem.

Regardless, none of that has anything to do with what we do with syntax highlighting in the newsgroup's web interface.

> On the forum though, characters are already escaped properly, so there's no need here. Syntax highlighting for larger blocks is something I'm meh on - I don't really care either way if we wanted to do it.

I don't really care what the web interface tries to highlight, but I don't want it doing anything that encourages people to start putting markdown in their messages, because I don't use the web interface, I don't want to have to see markdown in the middle of plain text messages any more than I want to see html.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Sunday, 11 November 2018 at 03:57:22 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> It may be that a feature was needed to do better character escaping

Yeah, I would have preferred to just escape all of it (and axe the biggest mis"feature" ddoc has imo - embedded HTML), but it got rejected :(

> On the whole, the worst features of ddoc are the ones that act least like macros. They're the ones that are most "magical" and the ones that generally have to be fought and worked around.

I have no problem with the

---
code
---

or with the

params:
 a = whatever

bit... though the stupid _highlight crap is awful, and

random:

being a header drives me a bit nuts too. So I guess I see where you're coming from.



Of course, I no longer care about ddoc, since I just did a custom doc gen.


> but I don't want it doing anything that encourages people to start putting markdown in their messages, because I don't use the web interface, I don't want to have to see markdown in the middle of plain text messages any more than I want to see html.

Frankly, people already do this stuff and I don't see that changing.


When I wrote my competitor for the forum back in the day, I had it trying to auto-detect code by looking for { or ; at the end of a line, or // at the beginning. I thought it worked reasonably well, but in the end i didn't really like it because IMO highlighting code on a forum is worthless anyway.

But so many people write the --- or ``` or <code> thing that it prolly wouldn't hurt to read it too.

On Friday, 9 November 2018 at 06:42:37 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Thursday, November 8, 2018 7:25:45 PM MST Neia Neutuladh via Digitalmars- d-learn wrote:
>> It's not a forum. It's a newsgroup that happens to have a web interface. Newsgroups are text-only. So bbcode is out, html is out, but interpreting markdown might be reasonable. But nobody's done that work.
>
> Honestly, having markdown in messages being typical would be _really_ annoying for those of us not using the web interface, because we'd see all of those backticks and the like as backticks, not as syntax highlighting. It would be like seeing html, albeit far less intrusive. I for one would much rather that things just stay as pure text and that we not be adding any features to the web interface that encourages adding _any_ kind of markup to messages. The web interface makes it easier for folks who don't want to use a newsgroup or mailing list to interact with the newsgroup, but it's still a newsgroup, and _many_ of us use it as such.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

I just want to say everyone who doesn't use the web-interface has to look at markdown anyway because people still write code in backticks etc. despite no support; even I do that.

Using markdown without support to me is not so much about whether it should be highlighted or not, but just that you can separate content from code in your message.

Similar to how signatures are usually separated by 3 or more slashes and then a new line:

Ex:

---

Some signature

On Monday, 12 November 2018 at 10:10:37 UTC, bauss wrote:

> I just want to say everyone who doesn't use the web-interface has to look at markdown anyway because people still write code in backticks etc. despite no support; even I do that.

Me, too. It's easy and unobtrusive.


As for actually rendering it, Validimir has commented on this in the past. From the D Blog:

> First, people using NNTP/email won’t see the rendered versions. Which isn’t a big deal by itself since it’s just text, but does create feature imparity. It *is* possible to write Markdown that looks fine when rendered but is unreadable in source form, especially with some common extensions such as GitHub Flavored Markdown.

> Second, unless we’re careful with this, people using NNTP/mailing lists might trigger Markdown formatting that could make their post unreadable. This could be avoided, though, by only rendering messages with Markdown if they originate from the web interface, which allows previewing posts."

And that quote is followed by this commentary from me:

"Even so, he’s hoping to add support for Markdown at some point in the future."

https://dlang.org/blog/2016/06/10/core-team-update-vladimir-panteleev/