a day early! or just on time? depends on if you view Wednesday or Thursday as the true patch notes day. (unless you’re an oldhead, in which case we’re a day late (ed. note: patch notes used to be on tuesday))
we’re still working on asks and the public API but we’re dropping patch notes early/late/on time today because we wanted to provide a very clear cutoff time for one change today which fixes some unintuitive behavior in markdown: single line breaks are now preserved! here’s some details on what that means.
previously, if you wanted a post to have line breaks matching what you’d see on most other platforms, you’d need to do some arcane bullshit. options included:
- adding two spaces to the end of a line (impossible on mobile since that gets collapsed into a period)
- adding an html line break (
<br />, impossible in comments since those don’t take html) - adding a backslash escape to an end of a line (
like this\). this is Secret Behavior that we’re pretty sure colin and jae are the only people who use. markdown is fun like that
these all obviously suck if you aren’t familiar with markdown (and also suck if you are) so now you can add a line break and it’ll Just Work.
since this change could change the rendering of old posts if we applied it site-wide, we’re bringing in a NEW AGE OF POSTING. these changes will only take effect on posts and comments made after 3pm EDT / noon PDT / @833 today (May 10, 2023).
if you want to keep using the arcane bullshit listed above, you can! they will still work as expected! this change just adds a new way of doing line breaks.
that’s all for this week! thanks, as always, for using cohost!
