Figure out a way to support tabs

[wooorm]

Initial checklist

• I read the support docs
• I read the contributing guide
• I agree to follow the code of conduct
• I searched issues and couldn’t find anything (or linked relevant results below)

Problem

Some folks like hard tabs. Markdown isn’t good at hard tabs. Maybe there’s a way to support it though.

The problem is that tabs don’t work well with whitespace sensitive languages, because well, certain indentation has meaning, which is sometimes unexpected, or can look different because tabs are displayed differently between team members.

Other languages (say, python) solve this by throwing errors and disallowing mixing tabs and spaces, but we can’t.

Solution

• It’s unclear when tabs should be used.
• It’s unclear if there are some edge cases where roundtripping would fail, there probably are though?

Alternatives

n/a

[wooorm]

Closing, after looking at this for a day, and some discussion with @remcohaszing. The whole point of tabs is that different authors can choose 2 or 3 or 8 or something else. But markdown is whitespace sensitive and the tab stops are always 4. If users display differently, that leads to bugs.