Exciting! Mastodon may soon see support for incoming rich text.
Which means that more formatting options will be seen in Mastodon.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/23913
See screenshot for what this might look like.
Conversation
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Chris Trottier (atomicpoet@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Mar-2023 22:16:34 JST 
Chris Trottier
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FeralRobots (feralrobots@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Mar-2023 22:16:39 JST 
FeralRobots
@atomicpoet
Huh- I thought it had this already, since I'm seeing what seems to be link & basic text formatting markup in a lot of posts. Is that some kind of accidental "support" - i.e., if your markup is minor enough it'll get ignored or just won't break stuff? Or are the instances of origin doing something special?
@fediversenews -
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Jupiter Rowland (jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Mar-2023 22:16:39 JST 
Jupiter Rowland
@FeralRobots The only tag which Mastodon doesn't strip away is the URL reference tag.
Bold type, italics, underline, strikethrough etc. are stripped away when they come in from other projects in the Fediverse.clacke likes this. -
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clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Mar-2023 22:16:46 JST 
clacke
@FeralRobots @atomicpoet @goatsarah Perhaps you occasionally saw it on another server than your home server when you forgot or didn't notice that you had navigated there? -
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FeralRobots (feralrobots@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Mar-2023 22:16:47 JST
FeralRobots
@goatsarah
No, I'm not seeing that as bold, which really makes me wonder how it's happening.
Bold/italic is not common, but I do see it. @jupiter_rowland has explained how I'm seeing links.
@atomicpoet -
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Mirko Schenk (mort@social.tchncs.de)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Mar-2023 22:17:50 JST 
Mirko Schenk
@atomicpoet @fediversenews I've got that in Elk already. Markdown is really fun with German. We've got gender stars (causing cursive), word part omitments with "-" (causing strike through), and (like English) omitted sounds with apostrophes, where some use gravis (`) instead (causing block quote).
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aethervision :ziltoid: (aethervision@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:43:15 JST 
aethervision :ziltoid:
@ItsGregory @atomicpoet @fediversenews Have y’all used iaWriter? Mac and iOS text editor with markdown and the strongest writing tools this side of scrivener. The iOS app has absolutely the best writing tools I’ve seen on mobile.
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It's Gregory (itsgregory@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:43:15 JST 
It's Gregory
@aethervision @atomicpoet @fediversenews Android user here, but familiar with rich text markdown
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aethervision :ziltoid: (aethervision@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:43:15 JST
aethervision :ziltoid:
@ItsGregory @atomicpoet @fediversenews Sun Microsystems employee number 5, Richard “Rich” Text. Developed a way to import bold and other type features into ordinary text. Currently 3rd in line for the British throne through the secret action of Parliament, the right honourable George Clinton presiding.
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It's Gregory (itsgregory@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:43:16 JST
It's Gregory
@atomicpoet @fediversenews
Excellent!
SimpleNote or Notepad++ -
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CarlRJ (carlrj@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:43:24 JST 
CarlRJ
@kkarhan @atomicpoet @fediversenews gee, and all this time, I thought it was @gruber who made Markdown.
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Kevin Karhan :verified: (kkarhan@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:43:25 JST 
Kevin Karhan :verified:
@atomicpoet @fediversenews I hope they give that release update the Nickname "Aaron"...
Cuz #AaronSwartz made #Markdown...
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CarlRJ (carlrj@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:45:41 JST
CarlRJ
@sukima @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird replacing a word marked up by underlining, with Unicode underlined characters is not the right path to go down. The •only• thing that can “easily” parse those characters by default are human eyeballs. Those who need to use screen readers plus any software that searches the text will have trouble with those underlined characters.
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sukima :verified: (sukima@twit.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:45:42 JST 
sukima :verified:
@atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird I find it curious how our computers all support UTF-8 yet the input methods are so shot that we need complex mark up language to enter in more typography then the 7-bit ASCII allows. I think the tech skipped a step somewhere.
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clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:54:34 JST
clacke
@AlisonW @quephird @MetalSamurai @sukima @carlrj @LucyWildboots @atomicpoet asexual/sexual/lichen
(I know what a/s/l means) -
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AlisonW ♿🏳️🌈 (alisonw@fedimon.uk)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:54:36 JST 
AlisonW ♿🏳️🌈
@LucyWildboots @sukima @MetalSamurai @carlrj @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird
Hmmn, yes. Guess we're also missing 'a/s/l' ? -
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LucyWildboots 🏳️🌈 (lucywildboots@c.im)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:54:37 JST 
LucyWildboots 🏳️🌈
@AlisonW We stopped? <g,d,r>
@sukima @MetalSamurai @carlrj @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird
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AlisonW ♿🏳️🌈 (alisonw@fedimon.uk)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:54:38 JST
AlisonW ♿🏳️🌈
@sukima @MetalSamurai @carlrj @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird
Ooh, yes, why did we stop using <g>?
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sukima :verified: (sukima@twit.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:54:39 JST
sukima :verified:
@MetalSamurai @AlisonW @carlrj @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird I started with Usenet in the 90's and I remember people using slashes and other forms of markup in ASCII for all kinds of emphasis. I even remember lots of <g> used for grin/joke. And it is amazing how this thread devolved into semantics instead of discussing the inability for technology to be expressive by design in the first place.
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Kevin Davidson (metalsamurai@mas.to)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:54:40 JST 
Kevin Davidson
@AlisonW @carlrj @sukima @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird You predate me. I only discovered Usenet in the late 80s. I definitely did not imagine this.
It’s mentioned in this document.
http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/EmphasisPattern -
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AlisonW ♿🏳️🌈 (alisonw@fedimon.uk)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:54:41 JST
AlisonW ♿🏳️🌈
@carlrj @MetalSamurai @sukima @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird
I've been sending messages online since mid-70s. Only ever saw/used back then
*big emphasis* (cf Bold)
_lesser emphasis_ (cf Underline)
Slashes? Nope. -
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CarlRJ (carlrj@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:54:42 JST
CarlRJ
@MetalSamurai @sukima @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird I was on Usenet quite a bit in the 80’s and 90’s. I don’t recall a lot of slashes being used for italics. Gruber invented something for his own uses that caught on, and nobody jumped in with a clearly better solution, so this is what we have.
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Kevin Davidson (metalsamurai@mas.to)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:54:43 JST
Kevin Davidson
@carlrj @sukima @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird The conventions I’m describing were in widespread use long before Markdown. If there are any text corpuses of Usenet posts or mailing lists from the 90s you’d find them in use everywhere, alongside old style ascii smileys. Markdown has now drowned out the old *bold* /italic/ _underline_ and I’m apparently now an old guy shaking my fist at the sky demanding the youngsters get off the lawn.
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CarlRJ (carlrj@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:54:44 JST
CarlRJ
@MetalSamurai @sukima @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird it’s a shame that your fork of the Markdown code to change it to what you believe is the proper syntax, never caught on.
It wasn’t some big committee that “got it wrong”, it was a guy, who did it for his own use, so he could write blog posts as plain text, and it caught on.
You can write your own and attempt to win Markdown users over to your side, but it’s an uphill battle. Common usage often wins over “better” (see QWERTY vs Dvorak).
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Kevin Davidson (metalsamurai@mas.to)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:54:45 JST
Kevin Davidson
@carlrj @sukima @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird Again, leading and trailing underscores mean UNDERLINE*. I was so angry when I first heard about Markdown (from people’s glowing reports about how wonderful, simple and obvious it was). Just took existing conventions and scrambled them up for no reason.
* of course if you really wanted to underline ironically you’d follow each individual character with the ^H_ sequence.
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CarlRJ (carlrj@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:54:46 JST
CarlRJ
@MetalSamurai @sukima @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird it’s a little trickier - in Markdown, single asterisks, or single underscores, mean italics, while double asterisks mean bold. I can’t recall ever seeing italics done with slashes. Looks too much like Unix pathnames.
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Kevin Davidson (metalsamurai@mas.to)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:54:47 JST
Kevin Davidson
@carlrj @sukima @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird I’m still salty because I thought we’d decided long ago that surrounding text with asterisks meant BOLD. But Markdown breaks that by treating it as EMPHASIS, which usually gets shown as ITALICS. As everyone knows, italics should be represented by surrounding the text with //.
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CarlRJ (carlrj@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:54:48 JST
CarlRJ
@sukima @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird (1) using • around words for emphasis is not a standard, and, just like using individuallly underlined letters, cannot be easily understood by software. Markdown can - simply because of widespread adoption, it’s a standard of sorts.
(2) 50 years since what? Computers have been around far longer, Markdown •far• less long.
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sukima :verified: (sukima@twit.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:54:49 JST
sukima :verified:
@carlrj @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird 1) You just emphasized just fine without Markdown 2) It has been 50 years, why are we as a technology community still //waiting// on a solution better than Markdown? —This is a bit of a devil’s advocacy but I still think we can express ourselves just fine with plain text without needing fancy things like RichText. It feels weird to me.
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CarlRJ (carlrj@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:54:51 JST
CarlRJ
@sukima @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird but Markdown is not the solution to a typography problem, it’s the solution to a semantic problem - you want to indicate that •these words• are being emphasized, not that those individual letters are each being emphasized. There •is• a difference, which, as mentioned, gets highlighted by thins like screen readers and programs reading text.
Markdown is not a great solution, but it’s a good solution to use while seeking a better one.
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sukima :verified: (sukima@twit.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:54:52 JST
sukima :verified:
@carlrj @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird Still kinda thinking inside the box. Why do we need a solution? It is ok to point out the awkward solutions we have to a problem that if history played out differently we would not have. Considering that we are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams how did we get to a point where markdown is the solution to a typography problem? Maybe things could be different.
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CarlRJ (carlrj@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:54:53 JST
CarlRJ
@sukima @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird we have 95 printable characters in the ASCII set, give or take, which isn’t too hard to work out on a 100ish key keyboard. What would make a better direct input solution for any of the tens of thousands of Unicode characters? Adding keys doesn’t scale.
We have an enormous number of symbols that it is good to be able to uniquely record in computers, but only a few handfuls we really need day-in/day-out. But I’m interested in alternate input solutions.
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sukima :verified: (sukima@twit.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-Mar-2023 18:54:54 JST
sukima :verified:
@carlrj @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird I was very much _not_ suggesting that. I was not suggesting any solution. I was merely contrasting that we got here and that technology has failed in something so basic as to need such awkward solutions anyway.
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