"markdown.it" is coming to Discourse

@blake @Vimala @Jhanarato

This is not going to be of immediate relevance, perhaps, but I thought i’d note it here. Discourse plans to move to the markdown.it parser.

https://meta.discourse.org/t/markdown-table-support/13546/46

See here:

With a demo here:

https://markdown-it.github.io/

There are some very nice improvements to the current markdown implementation:

  • Support for tables: Just yesterday, adding Ven Bodhi’s Introductions for In the Buddha’s Words, i struggled to find an acceptable way to present tables.
  • Smartypants: Yay, no more “ugly” quotes and–even worse–dashes.
  • Footnotes: Footnote support, including duplicate notes, markup inside footnotes, etc. These are handled in a similar way to links and images, so it is all nice and consistent.
  • Abbreviations: Hoverable links to abbreviations. The user defines these like footnotes. I’m wondering whether this could be hacked to include terms generally: create a list of Pali technical terms, and we get automatic lookup. But probably it’s a different thing. Could this be related to the ID link generator?
  • Marked Text: There’s a special <mark> tag, which might be useful to integrate with our inline-text highlight feature on SC. Once that gets enabled for one-boxing on Discourse, we can use <mark> for the highlighted portions.

With all these, we will pretty much have everything that’s needed for complex text markup. And markdown.it is designed to be easily extensible, too.