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It would help people to comprehend the vast mysteries of markdown if preview matched reality as per above.
arrowplum-
We can definitely improve this, but there are limitations and catches.
- If we make it incredibly accurate then it's slower (i.e. we send it off to the server and do the processing and deliver to you what the server will do)
- If we make the server do that work, we will still only do 80%... the last 20% are the embedding, mentions processing, which are currently done after you post it as some things might be slow (some embeds require us visiting a third party server for info)
We had the choice to deliver a client side preview that is a good approximation of the capabilities of the server and deliver a real-time and instant preview (it's done on your device).
Or, to deliver a highly accurate preview and potentially introduce a lot of lag (a 1 second round trip including processing) for every time you press the preview button.
We chose high speed and no lag, as that is the more pleasing experience. We accepted the downside is that all of the edge cases will be posted, and then subsequently edited... which isn't a great experience, but we hope fewer people experience this, and only then during the acclimatisation phase (which has only affected this forum which we've imported).
- If we make it incredibly accurate then it's slower (i.e. we send it off to the server and do the processing and deliver to you what the server will do)
Velocio
Markdown will remain fully featured, we do not wish to deviate from the commonly accepted features of Markdown and to introduce a new flavour different from everyone else's.
Markdown was chosen because:
>working in all email clients) so that we can add obviously missing functionality like replying to notifications via email and having those replies end up in the right conversation, messages, etcThe issue (if that is even the right word) with Markdown on LFGSS comes from people being very conditioned into how vBulletin and their flavour of BBCode operated. It's more about unlearning, and using plain text, than learning something new.
That said... we still support BBCode, so as long as you use minimal plain text to format your comments then there is no issue.
Of the 15,000+ comments since the switch over, only a couple have been badly formatted when newly authored, and about 10 have been badly formatted when trying to quote older hybrid and complex BBCode comments (big lists with lots of quotes and links).
Given we've just changed the input syntax, this is an incredibly low error rate.
I disagree with your view that there is a fundamental usability issue, and with most of your post TBH. It's not even true that BBCode was fully explicit, given that some things were automatic (linking, inheriting formatting including bold, italic, etc from pasted text, and so on).