Why does markdown do this? (whitespace trimming and other features)

[Rhababo]

@Canapin

I think Discourse wants to keep posts clean and easy to read.
By removing extra line breaks and trimming spaces at the beginning of lines, it ensures posts look consistent.

@Canapin

but my guess is that it’s to keep numbered lists as simple as possible

I really appreciate the insight. My community has a large forum game/storytelling sub-community where freedom in formatting tends to be worth more than consistency. If the core reason for these features is really to help maintain a consistent and simplified look, it is probably safe to ax them for my use case, or to at least give them a user selectable toggle.

@simon

It might be worth looking at this page and trying its 10 minute markdown tutorial: Markdown Reference .

This is a very helpful tutorial, and its emphasis on “making beautiful text” does seem to follow the ideas of consistency mentioned earlier. Thanks for pointing it out.