Should BB Code and Markdown Be Combined for Post Editing?

[michaellee8]

Markdown is a somehow universal language to do some documentary work, especially for Science and Computer works. There are already forums like Stack Exchange that uses this way to provide more human-readable presentation of posts.
However, BB code used here is quite a specific markup that is intended for Forums usage, and hence not really portable and compatible with the scientific discussion here. Those BB codes are in fact quite hard to read if you ask me.
i believe allowing a combination of BB code and markdown for post editing could be great, what do you guys think?

 

[Ibix]

What functionality would that add above the BBCode and LaTeX mix we have here?

 

[michaellee8]

1. Support for more ways to write those documents
2. Headers that is rendered with h1 h2 h3 etc.
3. More readable source code since BB Code is a bit strange actually.

 

[Borek]

Support for more ways to write those documents

We have BBCode and Latex, people already mix them in unpredictable ways. Adding another layer will only make things worse. Such posts are often impossible to quote and sometimes they are erratically rendered which makes them unreadable.

Headers that is rendered with h1 h2 h3 etc.

I don't think I ever needed headers in a forum post. Forum is not a publishing platform.

More readable source code since BB Code is a bit strange actually.

For someone used to BB code same can be said about markdown.

Once it gets popular things may change (it will be in the end up to @Greg Bernhardt to decide), but at the moment the markdown plugin for xenforo is far on the list of plugin downloads. Yes, it gets popular in some places, No, I don't see how it is going to improve PF at the moment.

 

[mfb]

This is a forum, and BBcode is used in most forums.

Markdown tends to over-interpret symbols used in formulas, especially *italics* when you want to write a*b*c, and links to WolframAlpha are a big mess because you have to escape every single closing bracket.