using markdown in a forum?

[Louis-David Mitterrand]

On Sat, May 01, 2010 at 01:10:50PM +0200, Allan Odgaard wrote:

> On 1 May 2010, at 11:45, Louis-David Mitterrand wrote:

> 

> >Is markdown a good language to use in a web forum application? How

> >does it compare to bbcode in features and ease-of-use for non-

> >technical users?

> 

> One advantage of BBCode is that it has nothing to do with HTML. It

> is its own language and fully defined.

> 

> If you allow Markdown you need to consider whether or not you want

> to filter out HTML tags (you probably do want to filter them out due

> to security). If you do filter them out, you force users e.g. to use

> Markdown links which for non-technical users might be done best

> using some widget (but the same is true of BBCode).

> 

> Also because Markdown is somewhat implicit (rather than explicit

> markup) it might be possible for users to trigger unwanted

> conversions, see GFM for 3 changes they made to avoid this:

> http://github.github.com/github-flavored-markdown/


Thanks for that informative answer.