Use markdown in comments and statuses

[brolund]

God? Bad? Ugly? Nice?

[johlrogge]

Good change of focus.

Good? Bad? Ugly? Nice? I'd say awesome. Here are my reasons:

• It is a tested format.
• Does not require any extra skills to add text just as you are able to today. With just a little bit of learning you can be more expressive.
• The casual user will probably not think about it and will just enter text as usual and don't even notice it's there short of an accidental emphasized text or asterisks or enumerated lists becoming prettier than intended.
• The more advanced user may figure out it is markdown and start using the more esotheric features such as verbatim blocks etc.
• While just preserving whitespace may seem simpler and faster, my experience is that unexpected issues show up along the way and the amount of work of just doing it quick and dirty is comparable to just run it through a library.
• If you run it through a markdown library you get som much more than just whitespace.
• Markdown is nice in the sense that it is readable even when it is not formatted.

The one thing that we may have to spend some time at is that URL:s should not have to be wrapped in markdown. They should just be detected. The library I linked to in #43 seems very extendable and if it is not already in there I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

I could even try to take the whole markdown issue and try to get it in there. I've been meaning to play with markdown for other reasons for some time now :)

[jancborchardt]

Wholeheartedly agree with @johlrogge on that one, also on the links. That’s also how Diaspora does it.