litphoria

Suggestion:

A lot of users prefer to highlight or reverse-highlight quotation-marked text in prose. So that requires using *"<text> `"*

It would be convenient if quotation-marked text would auto highlight, or reverse highlight, so that if it is inside an emote, it removes the asterisk highlighting, otherwise it adds highlighting.

Really don't want this to be automatic. Altering Markdown just to take options away from users doesn't seem like a good change.

That's potentially another way it could be alike syntax highlighting then, which I imagined would be configurable.

Configurable syntax highlighting would be best. People that like plain are covered, and it is backward compatible to the whole site.

Oh my god all of my nope @ the syntax highlighting in that example.

@Otaku, I'm certain it'd be configurable if it were to actually be implemented. "Full" syntax highlighting is probably an acquired taste, but clearly there's some desire for at least light stuff, like changing the color of "quoted text".

I was thinking of it merely parsing quote-marks and possibly treating underlying mark-up in some custom way (so that bold and italics are a little more obviously different than now is the case), but all configurable so that if you want none of it, you have none of it.

But I do like the syntax highlighting for composition mode, so that punctuation and stuff is much more obvious than is the case now on my high-res screen. Maybe my eyesight is going.

Using it for composition is interesting, yeah. Like, editors for programming languages do it and it's great.

I've got mixed feelings about this one, and I can certainly see its benefit, but it goes up against something I need: choice and control. Right now I have full control over quotes being formatted or not. I want to be able to do it how I want, rather than the site "helpfully" deciding for me how things are going to be formatted.

The discussion above about making this configurable means I need to bring this up: I need to know that the formatting I see is the formatting my partner will see. Italics and bold are important communication tools that let us control emphasis; switching them out willy-nilly can change meaning in ways I don't want. This means if a post is saved with "quotes are italicised", everyone should see it with "quotes are italicised". It can't be a viewer-side setting (like whether messages show up in block layout vs inline layout).

I'll provide a case for this, the following message, which has some italics at the end:

Lara opened the case left on their doorstep. "It's... a ram's head?" After a deathly silence she whirled, pale-faced, and grabbed her colleague. *"Shit, Tom! We need to get the hell out of here!!"*

The intended reading is this:

Lara opened the case left on their doorstep. "It's... a ram's head?" After a deathly silence she whirled, pale-faced, and grabbed her colleague. "Shit, Tom! We need to get the hell out of here!!"

The italics help reinforce the urgency in her voice. If it's a viewer-side setting, someone with "quotes are italicised" gets this output because the quotes inverted themselves:

Lara opened the case left on their doorstep. "It's... a ram's head?" After a deathly silence she whirled, pale-faced, and grabbed her colleague. "Shit, Tom! We need to get the hell out of here!!"

The emphasis got put in different places and some of my intended meaning is lost. This is part of that "I want to have control" thing I was talking about above.

And if you had viewer-side configuration over whether quotes are italicised or not right now, those of you with it enabled might be a bit confused and would probably have to turn it off to read this post the way it was intended to be read. In other circumstances, you wouldn't be sure whether "on" or "off" would give you the intended meaning.

Please no. It's super distracting.

Automating this has problems and is probably not worth the effort it would take to sort them out. This should still be done manually. Declining.

Wishing I'd had read this before making a post proposing something very similar.