On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 09:53:34 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> Remember that the forum software is just a frontend for an nntp server and
> that others view the content via nntp or via the mailing list. So, it
> doesn't make any sense to support features that involve anything other than
> plain text.

The beta forum doesn't look plaintext.

On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 11:28:41 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
> On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 09:53:34 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> Remember that the forum software is just a frontend for an nntp server and
>> that others view the content via nntp or via the mailing list. So, it
>> doesn't make any sense to support features that involve anything other than
>> plain text.
>
> The beta forum doesn't look plaintext.

Also markdown is plain text. That is the very point of formats like markdown and restructured text - to be perfectly readable in raw ascii form.

On Thursday, 4 June 2015 at 15:04:05 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> http://beta.forum.dlang.org/
>
> Many major and minor improvements.
>
> Some major ones:
>
> - dlang.org theme, fully responsive and mobile-friendly
> - keyboard navigation in all views
> - automatically saved post drafts
> - get notified of new posts and replies with subscriptions
> - full text search
> - by persistent request, a new view mode (vertical-split)
> - post to mailing lists
> - even faster, believe it or not.
>
> This update is the sum of 256 commits over 34 days of development.

Большое спасибо :-) Hope it's correct!

On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 11:28:41 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
> The beta forum doesn't look plaintext.

It's still plain text. It just parses format=flowed now (in addition to emitting it).

On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 10:48:31 UTC, ketmar wrote:
> On Fri, 05 Jun 2015 10:19:20 +0000, sigod wrote:
>
>> This just scares off users who doesn't have experience with all this stuff. And I believe now there's much more users, who doesn't even heard of NNTP, than whose who worked with it.
>
> i vote for dropping web interface at all. i believe that everybody should use NNTP reader.

Bad joke. It'll probably kill D in a long run.

On Fri, 05 Jun 2015 12:29:34 +0000, sigod wrote:

> On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 10:48:31 UTC, ketmar wrote:
>> On Fri, 05 Jun 2015 10:19:20 +0000, sigod wrote:
>>
>>> This just scares off users who doesn't have experience with all this stuff. And I believe now there's much more users, who doesn't even heard of NNTP, than whose who worked with it.
>>
>> i vote for dropping web interface at all. i believe that everybody should use NNTP reader.
> 
> Bad joke. It'll probably kill D in a long run.

it's not a joke, it's simply your message reworded by making NNTP users superior.

On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 10:54:03 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Friday, June 05, 2015 10:19:20 sigod via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
>> Markdown in a raw format is very readable. As for me, it's easier to read raw markdown than mix of text and code.
>
> Perhaps, but I don't want to see raw markdown in e-mails any more than I want to see raw html, even if raw markdown isn't quite as bad.

Your comparison of markdown and HTML doesn't make any sense. They're fundamentally different.

>> > So, while it might be nice to have markdown if we were dealing purely with forum software, we're not, so it doesn't make sense.
>>
>> I don't see a reason why forum cannot have features on it's own. Especially, when this features won't significantly affect other ways to access the same information.
>
> If you're screwing with the content of the messages, then yes, it does affect the other ways that the information is accessed - and that includes adding stuff like markdown or html into the messages. If it's something that just affects how the content is viewed in the web forum, then that's fine, but it needs to not mess with the content of the messages

Are you sure you aren't confusing something like [bbcodes] with [markdown]?

I don't see how markdown can obscure message. For example, this quotes (`>`) are part of markdown.

> or assume that all (or even a majority) of the users are communicating via the web forum.

You missed my point. I was talking about _potential_ users. Aren't we all want for D to became very popular and broadly used?


[bbcodes]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBCode
[markdown]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown

On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 09:16:30 UTC, sigod wrote:
> How about markdown support? It can have completely client-side implementation.

I have thought for a long time about this.

It's tricky.

There are multiple concerns:

1. People receiving messages through NNTP/mailing lists will not see the formatted Markdown. Although Markdown's goal is to be readable in its plain text source code, it still allows many situations in which the source is misleading or difficult to understand. For example, special characters need to be escaped by a backslash, which can create confusion in the presence of other special characters. (Are they part of the D syntax the user is describing, or something else?) Some syntax such as tables or images can also be not very readable in source form.

2. How should we render messages sent by NNTP/mailing-list users? Do we just assume that they're sending Markdown and render it as such? This can cause the messages to appear broken to forum users. Or do we only render Markdown if the post was sent from the forum? This means that when NNTP/ML users quote forum users' text it will be shown as plain text.

3. There is no unified standard for Markdown. The original format is not used on major sites today - StackOverflow and GitHub extend the format, and users will expect Markdown with those extensions.

4. Markdown's formatting for code (leading whitespace) is rather cumbersome, and difficult to use without either visual JavaScript text editors (as on SO) or Markdown extensions (as on GH).

5. You can't edit posts once sent. This means that if you accidentally messed up the formatting (e.g. you pasted code without padding it with whitespace or surrounding it in ```...``` blocks), you can't go back and edit it now.

You see this all the time on StackOverflow (even though it's user-editable) and more importantly on the vibe.d forums. It's pretty ugly, and in some cases, borderline unreadable (any indented lines are shown drastically different from unindented lines).

6. How do we encode that the message is in Markdown in the message's headers? "text/plain" + a proprietary header would be lying. "text/markdown" or something like that will likely cause the message to not be displayed at all in some readers. Sending a "text/html" part with rendered Markdown is an idea, but it also invites clients to send a "text/html"-only reply, which DFeed can't display.

To sum it up, it's a can of worms, and I'm fairly sure we're doing quite well without it.

On Thursday, 4 June 2015 at 15:04:05 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> http://beta.forum.dlang.org/
>
> Many major and minor improvements.

Awesome, great work.

In threaded mode, the frame around the message body could be a bit thinner (like the frame around the message header) to differentiate it more from the quote level lines.

On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 12:57:23 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> 1. People receiving messages through NNTP/mailing lists will not see the formatted Markdown.

That isn't a problem at all.

> Although Markdown's goal is to be readable in its plain text source code, it still allows many situations in which the source is misleading or difficult to understand. For example, special characters need to be escaped by a backslash, which can create confusion in the presence of other special characters. (Are they part of the D syntax the user is describing, or something else?) Some syntax such as tables or images can also be not very readable in source form.

I cannot speculate about it without actually trying to implement it.

> 2. How should we render messages sent by NNTP/mailing-list users?

Why should we?

> Do we just assume that they're sending Markdown and render it as such?

Yes. You already do it for quotes.

> This can cause the messages to appear broken to forum users.

Yes, it can be a problem. But, first: markdown render should be optional. And second: don't render if you're not sure how to render it.

> 3. There is no unified standard for Markdown. The original format is not used on major sites today - StackOverflow and GitHub extend the format, and users will expect Markdown with those extensions.

There's always should be a help which explains what supported. Also, I don't think we need _all_ syntax and all possible extensions. Just those which will improve readability.

> 4. Markdown's formatting for code (leading whitespace) is rather cumbersome

I dislike this syntax too. GitHub's extension:

```[language, optional]
<code in here>
```

Is much better.

> , and difficult to use without either visual JavaScript text editors (as on SO) or Markdown extensions (as on GH).

You already have `Save and preview` button.

> 5. You can't edit posts once sent. This means that if you accidentally messed up the formatting (e.g. you pasted code without padding it with whitespace or surrounding it in ```...``` blocks), you can't go back and edit it now.

I'm aware of that. As I said before: "don't render if you're not sure how to render it".

> You see this all the time on StackOverflow (even though it's user-editable) and more importantly on the vibe.d forums. It's pretty ugly

It all depends on actual users. We can't do anything about this.

> 6. How do we encode that the message is in Markdown in the message's headers?

Again. Why should we? See #2.