Hi, Is markdown a good language to use in a web forum application? How does it compare to bbcode in features and ease-of-use for non-technical users? I'm thinking of using jquery-markedit in that forum app. Thanks, -- http://www.cruisefish.net
On 1 May 2010, at 11:45, Louis-David Mitterrand wrote:> Is markdown a good language to use in a web forum application? How > does it compare to bbcode in features and ease-of-use for non- > technical users?One advantage of BBCode is that it has nothing to do with HTML. It is its own language and fully defined. If you allow Markdown you need to consider whether or not you want to filter out HTML tags (you probably do want to filter them out due to security). If you do filter them out, you force users e.g. to use Markdown links which for non-technical users might be done best using some widget (but the same is true of BBCode). Also because Markdown is somewhat implicit (rather than explicit markup) it might be possible for users to trigger unwanted conversions, see GFM for 3 changes they made to avoid this: http://github.github.com/github-flavored-markdown/ That said, I very much dislike writing text using BBCode.
On Sat, May 01, 2010 at 01:10:50PM +0200, Allan Odgaard wrote:> On 1 May 2010, at 11:45, Louis-David Mitterrand wrote: > > >Is markdown a good language to use in a web forum application? How > >does it compare to bbcode in features and ease-of-use for non- > >technical users? > > One advantage of BBCode is that it has nothing to do with HTML. It > is its own language and fully defined. > > If you allow Markdown you need to consider whether or not you want > to filter out HTML tags (you probably do want to filter them out due > to security). If you do filter them out, you force users e.g. to use > Markdown links which for non-technical users might be done best > using some widget (but the same is true of BBCode). > > Also because Markdown is somewhat implicit (rather than explicit > markup) it might be possible for users to trigger unwanted > conversions, see GFM for 3 changes they made to avoid this: > http://github.github.com/github-flavored-markdown/Thanks for that informative answer.
* Allan Odgaard <1EDF4D33-D1B1-4C97-A393-3D2B4EE5E095+Markdown at uuid-mail.com> [2010-05-01 13:15]:> If you allow Markdown you need to consider whether or not you > want to filter out HTML tags (you probably do want to filter > them out due to security). If you do filter them out, you force > users e.g. to use Markdown links which for non-technical users > might be done best using some widget (but the same is true of > BBCode).The correct solution is to filter the *output* of Markdown based on a tag whitelist. That way it doesn?t matter whether people write `<em>foo</em>` or `*foo*`, as indeed it shouldn?t. And it?s not impossible to write a 100% solid filter if you use a *white*list applied to a real HTML parser. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
On 2 May 2010, at 14:01, Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote:>> [?] you want to filter out HTML tags [?] > [?] And it?s not impossible to write a 100% solid filter if you use > a *white*list applied to a real HTML parser.Not sure what you mean by ?real HTML parser?. One thing to watch out for is improper HTML when users type a literal ?<?. I had a lot of users lose part of their comments because everything after a standalone ?<? was incorrectly filtered. This was with WordPress + PHPMarkdown (blog comments). What made it worse was that it was the filtered content which went into the database, so once filtered, the content was gone.