Birdout: Paradise

@SomeEgrets

disaster bird

he/him
egrets.ca/

i can't go to hell - i'm all out of vacation days. i watch space rocks and yell at computers for my day job. probably too old for any of this

i think i might be burned out on internet social. it's hard to keep doing it. it's hard to even maintain the amount of attention i'm already giving it

i am the cause of most of my own problems

furthermore, capitalism must be destroyed

birdsona: ?????

🌎 Ontario, Canada

webbed site

egrets.ca/

blog + rss

chirps.egrets.ca/

Birdout: Paradise @SomeEgrets10/13/2022, 9:10 AM

Natalie @nex3

Natalie @nex310/12/2022, 9:00 PM

pet peeve of the now:

Platforms that use Markdown-like syntax for formatting text but aren't actually compatible with Markdown. Gaze with me into the maw of madness:

	`_foo_`	`foo`	`foo`
Markdown	italic	italic	bold
Google Chat	italic	bold	unstyled
Facebook Messenger	italic	bold	bold & unstyled
Slack	italic	bold	bold
Backloggd	underline	italic	bold

These aren't even consistent enough that I can reliably remember "okay I should always use this one particular syntax for italics and that at least will always work". Nothing will always work. Life is suffering. At least Cohost is an island of standards-compliance in an ocean of nightmares.

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in reply to @nex3's post:

@hayley10/12/2022, 9:10 PM

ok. ok. i gotta ask. why is _foo_ not universally "underline". that feels like such a gimme

Natalie @nex310/12/2022, 9:19 PM

The glib answer is "because of John Gruber's whims in 2004". If I had to guess what his motivation was, though: semantic HTML was a big cause celebre at that point, and Markdown specifically produced semantic tags like <em> and <strong> rather than <span style>. There isn't a semantic underline tag (probably because the only semantic notion it communicates is "emphasis", which is already covered by <em>). So from the perspective of Markdown as specifically a gloss for HTML, rather than a syntax for expressing text formatting, it does make a degree of sense.

colin @vogon10/12/2022, 9:28 PM

yeah I think you can see remnants of a very early-2000s typography of hypertext in there: there is a single concept of emphasis with three levels (italics = single emphasis; bold = double emphasis; bold-italics = triple emphasis, for emergencies only), and underlines graphically overload hyperlinks so you should avoid them altogether

Nire Bryce @NireBryce10/12/2022, 10:04 PM

the other thing is that markdown is terrible to write a parser for your first time around, and there's a chance people were optimizing for 'ease of not having to write yet another case for *\_ parsing

adrienne @adrienne10/13/2022, 2:52 AM

Well, and Gruber comes from a typesetting background, in which underline is literally just a substitute for italics in contexts where it's not available. They're semantically equivalent

philosophy major (derogatory (reclamative))@nullpat10/12/2022, 9:57 PM

I think facebook messenger also only supports formatting in the web version and not in any of the apps

ash @hierarchon10/13/2022, 3:49 AM

and then of course there's emacs org-mode (which, to be fair, precedes markdown by decades)

Lotte 'just an idiot' May @LotteMakesStuff10/13/2022, 5:21 AM

Semi-related: I HATE chat apps that are like ‘oh you typed a word with *fucking stars* around it? Better do some STYLE.. no I am adding little cute stars for emphasis myself! Drives me crazy when slack does that and has fucking UI buttons right next to the text box. I want the text box to work like a text box and not do magic transformations ever. There is no good reason for a regular ass chat box to use markdown-like magic formatting

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