Code tag / escape character?

I understand your problems. I’m a math person, and I dislike it when I try typing the fraction “1 over 23” and get ½3.

@PhiNotPi Yes, that’s what I call a misfeature… Let’s see:
^1^ / ~23~ ought to do something more nearly correct according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_%28markup_language%29 but as we see, it does not.
That leads me to another point. Fluther’s implementation of Textile is not properly documented: http://www.fluther.com/help/formatting/ says:
bq. We use a limited version of Textile for formatting in questions, comments and responses. Here’s the list of the different options:[1]
but the listed options don’t include the “fractionizing” (½3) behavior you mention. The quoted text implies that that’s the full list of options; if it isn’t the full list, then the full list ought to be linked somewhere on the page. The wiki article isn’t it, because many of the options shown there aren’t implemented on Fluther, as this response shows.

I can understand that for security reasons users should not be allowed to emit arbitrary text to be sent to the server. I don’t allow it on my own sites. It’s also nice to provide a way for users to nicely format the things they submit. However, I don’t think that Textile (even full Textile) is the best solution to the problem, and I’d never implement it myself.
I’m not asking to get rid of Textile. That would be too much work for very little benefit, and would almost certainly enrage more users than it helps.
An escape character would be nice, though. \sigh…

#fn1. That was supposed to be a blockquote; this is supposed to be a footnote.

Looks like it’s time to link to this thread again. I have it bookmarked and have gone back to it numerous times.

Unfortunately, there is no development happening here at this time, so there won’t be an easy answer to this in the foreseeable future. The thread @Jeruba links to includes several work-around options that might be useful to you.

How does your editor read this, @rexacoracofalipitorius?
unix-command−−long-option

I used a pair of ASCII “minus sign” {U+2212} characters and no added spaces between “command” and “long”.

In this browser (iceweasel / Firefox) it looks like two em-dashes without any spaces between ‘command’ and ‘long’. Looking in the HTML source shows “unix-command−−long-option”.
I don’t know how to insert entities in Textile. When I type them in the text box they show up as regular text in the live preview. When I hit “Answer!” the they still show up as text (like the nbsp; below.)

  <- should be a non-breaking space

I can live with a weak subset of Textile, especially with the workarounds in @Jeruba‘s link. However, I would like it if the formatting system here was fully documented.

And yes, I am volunteering to write that documentation, if that’s what it takes.

@rexacoracofalipitorius I’d love that! However, I’m not sure whether or not I can replace what’s already there. It might be something only the owner can do. If you want to write it, I’ll see what I can do about getting it into place.

At least we could bookmark it here in this thread and link to it every time the question comes up. Maybe even link to it back in that old thread as well.

@augustlan Before I could start, I would need to gather the information I’d be documenting. Is this implementation of Textile part of Django, or is it something developed exclusively for Fluther? If the latter, is there any chance of getting a peek at the source?

If there’s no access to host it on Fluther, I could put it up on my own site and post a link here and in my profile.

@rexacoracofalipitorius I just forwarded this question to Ben. He’ll have the answers to your last questions. :)

@rexacoracofalipitorius As far as I know Ben/Andrew used Textile (Server Side) and later wrote the parts they wanted in Javascript so live previews would work.

Looks like it was blogged about.

Ben says he’d happily update the documentation.

That’s great!
I hope he’ll let me know if I can be of service in some way.

Also, I respectfully suggest that if Fluther’s codebase was open source, then this would be done already ;^)

I’m glad it isn’t. Proprietary rights of the owners aside, I’ve been very happy with the moratorium on development.

@Jeruba Open-source development need not affect the proprietary rights of owners, and in most cases it doesn’t.
Releasing source code under an appropriate license (like the GPL or the BSD license which Django is distributed) doesn’t affect one’s ownership in the work. It allows people to copy and to redistribute it under certain limited conditions, that’s all.
It also makes bugs easier to find and remove, especially if your code is so great that people use it in other contexts- or if your application (i.e., Fluther) is so great that people want to help make it better (i.e., me, on this issue).
Sorry for the off-topic comment, but as you might gather from my profile, open source and Free Software are pretty important to me.
⌨

Hm, apparently entities show up in the submitted answer but not the preview. Good to know.

Well, @rexacoracofalipitorius, I didn’t know that, so that’s interesting information. Thanks for enlightening me.

Still, I’ll repeat: Proprietary rights of the owners aside (meaning that’s another topic and doesn’t have a bearing on what I’m about to say), I’ve been very happy with the moratorium on development.

@Jeruba And well you might be, as so far the site is functioning mostly as it ought. At least, as far as we can tell.
Unfortunately it’s a fact that software is never finished, especially a complex project like a Web application (and particularly one which depends on an even more complex project like an application framework). Dependencies change, attackers’ tactics evolve, users’ opinions change, and so forth.
If an application is to survive, development can’t cease- eventually some unforeseen complication will make the thing stop working.
That said, development needn’t and shouldn’t have immediate effects on the production site, and not all patches to an open-source project will be merged. Open-source development gives a maintainer more control, not less.

It occurs to me that you might be happy with a moratorium on development for reasons I haven’t thought of. Is it so, and if so, what are they if I may ask?

Without answering for @Jeruba, @rexacoracofalipitorius, because she’s perfectly capable of expressing her own opinions, and because we don’t always share the same opinions, most of us have been on sites that have continued various forms of ‘development’. More often than not that development has created a site that we no longer enjoyed.

Fluther has been pretty good as-is for the past few years now, with glacial or totally arrested development. I agree with you in welcoming some relatively minor code tweaks, which most probably won’t even see or be aware of, but I don’t think any of us want to see great “development”.