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If "<i>" is innocuous enough to be allowed in questions and answers, why can't we use it in comments too? Please don't make me memorize a bunch of dippy Markdown syntax just to add a little flavor to my comments.

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    Dippy markdown? Theres ** for bold and * for italics, which I would take over <i> and <b> anyday.
    – Ian Elliott
    Jul 17, 2009 at 0:03
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    See, right there I have to remember which is which. If I'm going to commit that to memory it's probably going to come at the cost of forgetting something else, like the capital of Sri Lanka.
    – phenry
    Jul 17, 2009 at 0:07
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    Agree with @Ian
    – Alex Budovski
    Apr 1, 2010 at 9:03
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    @Ian, @Alex: That would be a bit more helpful if there was preview so you could check that you'd gotten it straight before posting.
    – SamB
    Sep 29, 2010 at 19:35
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    @SamB preview for comments seems a bit much.
    – wchargin
    May 7, 2013 at 3:22
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    Subscript and superscript would not hurt.
    – Nicolas Barbulesco
    May 4, 2014 at 13:44
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    @phenry the capital of Sri Lanka is Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte (JIC you forgot).
    – Stack Underflow
    Jan 6, 2019 at 23:49

4 Answers 4

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We do allow very limited markdown in comments now. Click the "help" link below the Add Comment button to get comment formatting help.

  • * and _ for bold, italic
  • `` for code blocks
  • [example](http://example.com "merely an example")

No HTML, just Markdown in comments, please!

See: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/editing-help/#comment-formatting

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I think the idea of a comment should be a quick text entry. If the comments start getting all jacked up with LI and IMG and all of the others, you lose all UI smoothness for the sake of better terms.

Overall, please no...

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A markdown for links would be great and helpful, something like A Search Engine

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    We have that already for markdown. It just doesn't work in comments: a search engine.
    – bignose
    Mar 23, 2010 at 11:52
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    Though of course it should.
    – bignose
    Mar 23, 2010 at 11:53
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    @bignose it does now!
    – Jeff Atwood
    Apr 1, 2010 at 9:19
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Personally, I'm just sick of having to remember to escape > and < in posts but not in comments.

Okay-- and I'd love to know how to escape asterisks because I've had to resort to using >smile< instead of my usual "asterisk" smile "asterisk"... >sigh<

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  • Comments are text. Text only! No bold. No italics. Just text! Let's just agree that we shouldnot need to escape anything. We can disagree on the reason that would be :). I would hate escaping them too, just don't use them that way.
    – RSolberg
    Jul 17, 2009 at 2:38
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    I'd like text-only comments. Some Markdown support got added to them sometime last week, I believe. I recall leaving a comment with some asterisks around a word (something I've done in text for years) and was surprised to see italics in my resulting comment. Or are you arguing that I shouldn't use underscores and asterisks in text in general?
    – Evan Anderson
    Jul 20, 2009 at 13:46
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    well, probably they shouldn't have changed the syntax out from under the feet of existing, frozen comments, but oh well...
    – SamB
    Sep 29, 2010 at 19:39

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