I’ve wondered about this for awhile now. They aren’t that far off, but there are differences I know that will break some of my posts.
What happens to older posts if/when the Markdown interpreter changes; will we get a choice of interpreters to use, or just have to fix whatever breaks by hand? ie write it to the tighter spec now and avoid future issues?
At first, nothing at all. Discourse runs the raw post content through its Markdown parser only when the post is saved, not when it is read.
This “cooked” post text remains untouched unless the post is edited, an admin (or mod?) clicks a special button (which affects that post only) or the server admin runs rake posts:rebake (which would rebake all posts in the forum).
Actually, the BAKED_VERSION variable would be incremented if a major change happened, which triggers a background task to, every hour? or so, rebake 100 posts that are currently on the old version.
Is there any idea of when CommonMark support will be added?
I only bring this up because our users are still incapable of writing proper lists, which CommonMark seems to handle gracefully without a hard requirement on a line break between a paragraph and a list for it to be rendered as the user intends it to be.
Obviously this is a small issue in the grand scheme of things, but I imagine our forum is not the only one where this is the #1 most common mistake made when writing posts.
As you might be able to tell, I am really tired of this particular mistake so will be very happy when I can stop editing everyone’s posts to correct it.