
How I Think Posting HTML In Comments Should Work - joshuacc
http://css-tricks.com/13695-how-i-think-posting-html-in-comments-should-work/
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mtogo
Why not just use markdown? There's no chance of messing up the escaping, and
there's no knowledge of html required for your commenters.

Want to make something italic for emphasis? Encase it in asterisks. Want to
make it more emphasized? Encase it in two. Links are reasonably simple, too
(if you decide to allow them). Quoting someone, either indent it by a few
spaces or put a > char in front of it, depending on the implementation.

Or skip markdown and use wikitext or bbcode.

It's easy for you, it's easy for your site visitors.

~~~
kijinbear
Completely agreed. The method described in the article requires commenters to
use HTML tags and even know how to balance them. In addition, it is supposed
to detect code blocks automagically, which would be prone to errors. (How do
you know whether a block of text is English or Python?)

Markdown is terse, easy to write, and readable even when rendered in plain
text. There's a reason why so many web sites, from Reddit to Github to Stack
Exchange, uses Markdown exclusively.

As for the alternatives: Wikitext ''seriously'' '''overloads''' the
'''''apostrophe''''', often needs to be supplemented with <u>HTML</u> anyway,
and contains [[wiki-specific syntax]] which is not relevant in most blog-
commenting situations. BBCode is just a bastardized subset of HTML. It's
popular in old-fashioned forum software, but I see no reason to use it in new
applications.

~~~
mtogo
Absolutely agree about bbcode, i was just using it as an example since i
couldn't think of any good markdown replacements besides wikitext.

~~~
kijinbear
There's Textile, but its handling of blockquotes and code samples is much less
convenient than Markdown. Github's wiki used to use Textile, and it sucked.

