I’m Ham and I’m a developer on the Teams team here at Stack Overflow. Over the past few months, I’ve been heads down working on the way we turn Markdown into HTML when writing and editing posts across the network. I’d love to share what I’ve come up with.
In a nutshell: We're planning to use Comm...
In June of last year, SE changed from their proprietary Markdown dialect to CommonMark, and CommonMark requires a space after the # sign(s) for something to render as a header.
When they transitioned, they built a program that would convert posts to CommonMark, but that script was extremely basic and only accounted for the common differences (e.g. headings, quotes, etc.) and didn't account for more nuanced differences.
So at that time, posts fell into three buckets, with the cached HTML from the time the post was last rendered, and the new HTML rendered using the original Markdown and the new CommonMark renderer, either: 1. matching perfectly (usually posts that had no formatting at all), 2. not matching perfectly but could be edited by said automatic script to match perfectly, or 3. not matching perfectly and the output from said automatic script didn't match perfectly either.
Posts in bucket 1 were retained as is, as there was nothing to do with them. Bucket 2 posts were edited by said script and re-rendered accordingly. Your post fell into bucket 3.
So my post was using HTML that was generated back in the Markdown era, and when I edited it, it was re-generated with CommonMark, which resulted in a slightly different unexpected output?
As the script only accounted for the most common differences, posts that contained less common differences, no matter how minor, wouldn't be edited as the script output wouldn't be a perfect match with the original cached HTML.
Here's an answer where I explain this in more detail.
In my opinion, adopting CommonMark was a good thing, since it prevents ambiguities like this.
@TheforestofReinstateMonica No, the post that wasn't converted must have had something else mismatch the CommonMark rendering. The bot (script I mentioned above) only edited posts if its HTML output exactly matched the previous cached rendering; if it didn't in any way, it left it alone.
> This rule was common enough to be included in the migration script, though. But, as your post wasn't automatically edited, what happened here is that there must have been something else that wasn't compliant that caused the automated script to back out.
Typically, the most common thing I see in such posts is sub-bullet or sub-number formatting: previously, only one preceding space was required, now two are required, but this rule wasn't common enough to be included in the script.
So posts that formerly used a single space to produce sub-bullets, and also used headings without spaces wouldn't be edited at all, since all the script did was fix the heading, and even with just those fixed, the new HTML wouldn't be a perfect match with the cached rendering.
MODS, I just noticed I don't have a "positive question record" can someone please tell me how many deleted questions I have? (And how many of the deleted Q's were negative/closed)?
@MetaAndrewT. thanks but it didn't work, if had a deleted questions that were only 60 days old I would likely remember. I don't like bothering the mods, but there's no other way to be certain other than asking or having 10k...
This search query should show: Newest sort order, deleted, with a Score between -100 and 0 - I can see well past 60 days, you should be able to see your own deleted Q&As too (regardless of your reputation).
@Tinkeringbell that was the case for me on SO, got Unsung Hero out of the blue without even understanding what those badges are. Getting gold badge without even trying felt good.
Same in early winter bashes, I didn't hunt for hats too much (just some basics) and got several secret hats that turned out to be quite hard to get. :D
I think the hardest was Red Baron.
But meh, times change.
Coffee doesn't. That's a solid rock of stability in a world of changes. ;)
Interesting: question closed notifications don't appear in the app, and when you view your notifications in the app it clears the notifications from the website as well, in which case you won't see the question closed notification at all.