this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
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149
By the way, you can have Markdown in Lemmy post titles (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
50 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

EDIT: on web, it renders like this

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 3 weeks ago (9 children)

You can, but maybe you shouldn't. Given that this post is in the fediverse community, I don't feel too bad about mentioning that Lemmy is part of a federated network with PieFed and MBIN (I try not to bollock on too much about the platform I happen to be using).

In the ActivityPub JSON for this post, there is no indication that this field contains MarkDown. If anything, it says the opposite, it says it contains HTML. It's therefore not unreasonable for other platforms to render it as such.

Given this, and the poor support for mobile clients indicated in the comments, and the fact that it's only a subset of MarkDown tags, but include ones that aren't part of CommonMark standard, I'd argue that it's not necessarily a good idea.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

In the ActivityPub JSON for this post, there is no indication that this field contains MarkDown. If anything, it says the opposite, it says it contains HTML. It’s therefore not unreasonable for other platforms to render it as such.

Actually, the name property is explicitly plain text, it shouldn't contain any type of markup, whether that be markdown or HTML.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Oh, wow. Thanks.

For clarity, I wasn't intending to say that PieFed treats that field as HTML (it treats it as text), I just meant that if you were looking at that JSON, and being a bit lazy like me and not looking at specs, then it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that the 'mediaType' field also refers to 'name' (rather than a 'content' field which this post doesn't happen to have).

Anyway, this seems to be even more reason why MD shouldn't be put in titles, and front-ends shouldn't be encouraging the practise by rendering it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Eh, I'll probably use italics tho, just like I did * in reddit.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

Also, this gives me real text-on-image-in-Facebook-post-just-to-get-noticed vibes.

If everybody can use Markdown in their post titles, then everybody will use Markdown in their post titles, until it's a mess of colors, bold, and italics.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Markdown is plain text, so it's fine to go in the field. It's also fine for apps to allow OP's post to look like garbage because there's no requirement for support.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

A comment here distinguishes between the 'plain text' that's allowed by the spec, and MarkDown as a markup language (it's confusingly named, I guess, but that's what Wikipedia categorises it as too)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Oh yea, I just mean that all markdown characters are ASCII, and thus allowed in a plain text field. 😉

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

In the ActivityPub JSON for this post, there is no indication that this field contains MarkDown. …. it says it contains HTML

This seems like a bug. Regardless of what clients may support, the json ought to accurately describe fields

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago

Another commenter (who's contributed code to Lemmy) pointed to a link that provides the specification for that field: "A simple, human-readable, plain-text name for the object. HTML markup MUST NOT be included."

So in this case, it's more that the JSON looks a bit ambiguous: 'mediaType' is only referring to the format of the text in a post's body, but - unlike me - you'd also need to be aware of the spec to know that it doesn't apply to the title.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

The Lemmy backend doesnt treat this field as markdown, if you look at the Activitypub data (curl -H "Accept: application/activity+json" https://lemmy.world/post/24241974 | jq) the title is federated as plaintext. Only lemmy-ui decides to render it as markdown for some reason.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

Word of caution, it doesn't render on Connect for Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Hmm, but the best part about markdown is that it is human readable regardless so it should still be fine

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

i am not human

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Nor Boost. It does in Raccoon, though.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

or in Jerboa

[–] borth 14 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Works in Voyager!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

Not for me

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

Boom.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Or Thunder

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

Renders fine in Sync

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

Renders in Summit, but I turned that off because any post title starting with # is rendered as h1.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

If you have markdown on your title, then is not being rendered by Jerboa.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Do you also have the Android weirdness in which the tick marks appear to be in a different place? (Not Jerboa-specific)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

The tick marks appear correctly for me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

Sync for lemmy works

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago

I'd settle for good spelling and grammar. Once most posters have mastered that, let them play with the formatting.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago

You can also edit them after the fact unlike other platforms

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

What good is it for if I can’t change post title font to Comic Sans.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

ABSOLUTELY NOTHIN

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Good god, ya'll.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Oh no

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

Oh no indeed

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

(unlike Reddit, for example)

I use bold and italic a lot in post titles. Some of the other stuff wouldn't make much sense I don't think, but every little bit helps.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

I mean, code could work and maybe ^superscript^ or ~subscript~ and that's about it I think

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Can you create headings in headings?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

You can, and it'll probably get annoying if everyone catches on!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

OK, I will never use it again.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

~oh no~

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Are sub and superscript officially supported by markdown now? Or is that a Lemmy-specific extension?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Lemmy-ui uses markdown-it: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/blob/main/package.json#L65

Markdown-it follows the CommonMark spec with extensions: https://spec.commonmark.org/current/ As I see superscript is not part of the spec, but listed in the markdown-it readme as a plugin, so I guess it's coming from there: https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it?tab=readme-ov-file#syntax-extensions

They are also listed in package.json:

    "markdown-it-sub": "^2.0.0",
    "markdown-it-sup": "^2.0.0",

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/blob/main/package.json#L73

Lemmy docs about markdown support: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/02-media.html#text

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I think it's fine to use unique platform features like this, but if you're actually using this actively, be aware that not everyone will see your titles as you intended them. It's only Lemmy users that can see it actually render "properly", everyone else just sees the plaintext Markdown symbols.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

Hmm, sounds like a good point. Here's my sub:
https://lemm.ee/c/eurographicnovels

Can you tell me how our formatting might be messing search engines and stuff..?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

@[email protected] Doesn't render it on Mbin

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

Wow, amazing

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Be careful of the character limit on each viewer, as they can "trim" your title in the middle of some markup tag and just display part of it as the title.