 I keep getting asked to support writing rich-text-formatted posts in #Hometown (we already read them just fine). I finally wrote down, in this comment on this Github issue, a short essay outlining all my concerns with doing so: https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/issues/1274#issuecomment-1379647384 Some of this is problems with Markdown, while some of this is problems with interoperability regarding any rich text rendering at all. 8 comments
 @darius Definitely a class of problem that needs wider Fediverse adoption for safe usage. Lovely chickens and eggs There almost needs to be an RFC process for this that includes more than just Mastodon, but also has key members from upstream Mastodon at the table Out of curiosity, this seems the most active upstream issue on it that I see: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18958 Don’t see any clear maintainer discussions and love the bog down into subset of Markdown semantics  This is how I do it in RSS. I include both the rendered version and the markdown version of the text if it's available. The default is the rendered version because there aren't many apps that are looking for the markdown version, but my apps are. Here's a blog post that explains. http://scripting.com/2022/07/19/152235.html?title=devNotesForMarkdownInFeeds @davew thank you -that's a good reference. ActivityPub supports a "contentMap" for sending out content translated in multiple languages ... I'm not sure it would work for formatting (I don't want to pollute localization space in the spec) but ideally I could do something where I provide two versions in a single message that a server can choose to render (with sensible default) Happy to help. The closer these things are to each other the easier interop will be when the time comes. @darius @davew Does the "source" property in the #ActivityPub spec (Sec. 3.3) help at all? The spec says it's for including the raw source (like MarkDown) for formatted content. |
Gregory's Server
@darius really great thoughts, and honestly a frustrating example of how the general accessibility of markdown just wouldn’t work out, and could ultimately make things less accessible with key context vanishing unpredictably for users on other servers :(