HTML entities in Markdown—for HTML and other output formats:
– Which ones would you support?
– For most entities, using the Unicode character directly seems like the best solution(?)
– I can’t think of any exceptions. Maybe:
@rauschma Maybe ­ too, and basically any non-printable character, e.g. ⁠ and maybe ‌ (no idea if they have names in HTML, and U+200C might be enough/better as direct Unicode character as it should have a visible effect): https://invisible-characters.com/
@rauschma I find it interesting the people that want/prefer to use the :shortcodes: for emoji and other Unicode. But part of why I find it interesting is those colon surrounded shortcuts were popularized in (Github Flavored) Markdown and the overlap with HTML entities is obvious. Makes you wonder if HTML was standardized a couple decades later if there would be a lot more emoji entities (or almost no entities at all).
@rauschma@max The appeal of shortcodes, as with anything in Markdown – as it was conceived, is readability. The "problem" is that shortcodes are only supported by specific variants (GfM, I guess?), while HTML entities are compliant with all Markdown flavours. In my opinion, shortcodes are better aligned with John Gruber's original vision of the format.
@idleberg@rauschma@max More than readability, I'd say writability: it's easier/faster to type a shortcode than reach for an emoji keyboard (or other input helper) and find the appropriate emoji. Not all setups have (usable) shortcuts to easily type emojis.
@tbroyer@idleberg@rauschma I think that was true when the shortcodes were first popularized. Also some of the popular Markdown tools weren’t yet always UTF-8 safe. (Admittedly a MySQL problem some of the time.)
Today emoji keyboards are in all major OSes and an easy key press away. Thanks in large part to emoji themselves we can trust Unicode to work almost everywhere. I think the readability of just using the intended emoji directly bests shortcodes, esp. how easy I find them to type.
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