On Thursday, 23 October 2014 12:03:20 CEST, Luca Barbato wrote:
While discussing about commonmark adoption one of the point is how to
foster usage.
How hard would be having a commonmark (markdown) mode that gets
translated in html in trojita?
(Replying to the Trojita ML as agreed. Folks, please keep Luca in Cc, he's
not subscribed here.)
In general, I do not think that this is a good idea. E-mail is extremely
conservative, and there's a ton of broken tooling out here. There's no
chance to send e-mails in markdown only, nobody would be able to read them
(well, Trojita would show its source, but we haven't exactly achieved world
domination just yet).
So about the only reasonable choice is to embed the markdown as yet another
format in a multipart/alternative container, and hope that it doesn't break
stupid clients which are hard-coded to look for a text/plain at offset 0,
and text/html at offset 1 -- given my experience on StackOverflow, there is
plenty of people who find *that* reasonable.
At that point the quesiton is "what you're hoping to achieve". Is it any
better if one suddenly starts getting multipart/alternetive with three
parts instead of two?
Anyway, Trojita already does support some very limited markup of the text;
*bold*, /italic/ and _underlined_ texts are all highlighted, links are
autodetected, and quoted text chunks (as the one at the very top of this
mail) are rendered and auto-collapsed properly. We do this for text/plain
unconditionally, and no other MIME types are subject to this formatting.
Is there anything else you find valuable within e-mails? Stuff such as
headings, ordered/unordered lists,...?
Cheers,
Jan
--
Trojitá, a fast Qt IMAP e-mail client -- http://trojita.flaska.net/
