Personally I am completely against this.
Firstly, the other changes (auto-linking bare http://example.com
links, no intra-word emphasis a_b_c
) don't deviate too far from regular markdown, this does.
The other changes aren't really problems for users of the data-dump, or who are used to markdown else where. The intra-word-emphasis default behaviour should be quite rare, due to the in_line_code
formatting, and markdowns ability to escape underscores (yay\_for\_escapes
). The non-auto-linked links are a minor annoyance, plus many markdown parsers already have options for auto-linking.
I also think this change will encourage people to try and post code snippets using new lines, rather than the proper 4-space indentation of pre tags.. This will lead to less subtle errors, for example:
Am *def = 456;¶
Ex *abc = *def;
..will become bold, and look broken.. but not not quite broken enough for the user to look at the preview and think, "hmm, I wonder how I post code snippets without it breaking"
Yes, people still post code despite it looking like a mess, but at least it's easy to spot a giant blob of text, and for someone to edit the question and fix up the formatting (something I regular do quite happily)
On the subject of the preview, all the SO markdown modifications this far have been made to SO's markdown engine, but not the preview. The disparity between the showdown.js rendered preview and final output was already a problem, and this will further exacerbate it..
Ignoring all the miscellaneous weirdnesses like this:
Removed support for intra-word emphasis like_this_example
This change hasn't be mirrored in the preview (a_b_c
shows up at abc in the preview, but a_b_c in the final post)
Added auto-hyperlink support for http:// URLs in posts
Nor has this change been mirrored - http://example.com shows up as plain text in the preview, and a link in the final post
Further, I think encouraging people to split text into paragraphs makes their text easier to read. Allowing one-line-break-br's will increase the number of "giant lump of text" questions.
Perhaps the largest issue is: how will questions be migrated to the new markup syntax? This will screw up the display of older post - you can't justswitch to the new markdown()
function, not when you can edit old and new posts alike. Say I edit a post that was made with "so-markdown-v1", where new lines are handled the "old" way. I fix a spelling mistake, and click save. Suddenly it's rendered with "so-markdown-v2" and is displayed completely differently.. Another way would be to convert all old posts, removing any new lines not ending in two spaces. This could work, but are you going to do this across all the SO family, and all the StackExchange sites, without introducing any formatting errors?
Finally, I don't think this is a particularly big problem.. There are currently over 330,000 questions on Stackoverflow. Most are perfectly well formatted, most of the others are badly formatted because, well, the author is lazy - lack of any kind of punctuation/formatting, basic spelling mistakes, where the user clearly hasn't re-read their question (I don't mean people who are learning English as a second language, but rather from people who clearly don't care about their question) - such questions would not be helped by turning newlines into <br>
tags, as there is no newlines anyway!
I've tidied up lots of badly formatted questions, but I recall seeing very few questions where someone has tried to format their question nicely, but not understood simple markdown syntax, such as two-returns == new paragraph, lists need spacing.. Besides, once they've made the mistake once, it's easy to pickup the solution - put a blank line between chunks of text, just like every book uses to separate paragraphs..
All that said, if this change is made, please do what Github has done - do not call it "Markdown", it's not, call it something distinct, like "Stackoverflow Flavoured Markdown", and mention that clearly next to the input box.
Also, make it internally consistent - if you change the behaviour of newlines in text:
Hi¶
this is my question
..becomes..
Hi
this is my question
Then the same should happen with blockquotes..
> Hi¶
> this is my quoted question
..becomes..
Hi
this is my quoted question
Not like the current markdown:
Hi
this is my quoted question
Since this post is rather long and rambling, my main concerns are:
- Is this really worth the effort?
- Will the site make it clear it's no longer using standard markdown? (Github does this well)
- Will the alterations be internally consistent? Must act the same in different blocks, including markdown blockquotes, must not require blank lines about lists and code blocks, and be consistent with the WMD preview
- How will questions using the old markdown be migrated, without breaking the formatting of old questions?
<br/>
would cause validation errors :P