Markdown support for complex data fields

[declan]

As I mentioned on the Google group last week, we have some multi-paragraph data fields and have added Markdown support to deal with that in our fork. Do you guys see this as a common enough problem that you'd like to include it here too?

Here's what a pull request would look like:
https://github.com/purplebinder/ohana-web-search/commit/c3750d797c4ef8454adb878a4f0f878beafff78e

[anselmbradford]

@declan sorry for the slow response on this. Just so I understand, so in the fields in the API you have markdown and this addition would render it? So for example, you could put markdown in say the description field and have a bulleted list, etc. displayed in that field on the page. I'd be slightly worried about the design consequences of the markdown. Are the lists, blockquotes, etc. that the markdown presumably could introduce styled?
Other than that, I don't really have strong feelings on this, @monfresh any thoughts from you?

[monfresh]

@anselmbradford Markdown syntax is shorthand for HTML. Markdown interpreters convert the Markdown text to HTML. There is no styling involved.

@declan Your code seems reasonable, but I'd have to read more about RedCarpet and other Markdown gems to determine what's best.

[anselmbradford]

@anselmbradford Markdown syntax is shorthand for HTML. Markdown interpreters convert the Markdown text to HTML. There is no styling involved.

Right, which is my concern. So you could have a description field that included, say <ul><li>item1</li><li>item2</li></ul>, and that would end up in the details view as a list, but without anything but the default or normalized styling (styling to normalize the default styling between browsers), which may look awful. So I'd just want to see any field that was exposing embedded HTML through markdown filled with the available markdown (lists, blockquotes, etc.) and checked to ensure the introduced HTML looks okay.

[monfresh]

I don't understand your concern. You would convert the Markdown to HTML for specific fields, and you would add CSS for those fields to make sure they look nice.

[anselmbradford]

Right, so checking the appearance and checking/updating the CSS would be part of this issue, right? That's all I'm saying.

[monfresh]

Absolutely. Now I understand that your concern is that Declan's proposed PR didn't include styling. Communikayshon!