(I’m n00 and coming at this cold for reasons explained below. If I’ve made a faux pas or referenced something incorrectly, please let me know.)
As a pretty frequent redditor, it’s become more and more apparent that the Apple/Swift-Markdown renderer, while fine in silos, fails to render input as intended when provided external content from sources that adhere to a non-GitHub Markdown spec. I’d like to suggest considering a remedy.
My specific motivation is that I love to end sentences with italicized exclamation points — like this*!* — just for fun, of course. These render just fine on both old- and new Reddit in the browser.
But since the Apple/Swift-Markdown renderer spec (assuming I’ve found the correct document) specifically requires either whitespace or punctuation before an asterisk-punctuation sequence in order to start an emphasized sequence, my exclamation points come out escaped like this*!*. That’s just one example. The Reddit browser I use on my iPhone and iPad is Apollo for Reddit, and there are posts over on the r/ApolloApp subreddit pretty frequently from users who find something or other that doesn’t render quite right in the app.
Christian, the lone dev, has mentioned a few times that he uses Apple/Swift-Markdown to interpret the Markdown code, which implies that this isn’t something he can just fix/change on his own. The fact that the issue seems not limited to myself seems to imply that it’s probably happening elsewhere too — in other apps interacting with services that follow yet other markdown standards.
So I researched the hell out of this and found my way here to suggest considering making the renderer agnostic with respect to Markdown flavor, to provide a way of telling Apple/Swift-Markdown which set of rules to use when parsing the plain text.
And I was hoping that you might agree.