Just thought I’d let everyone know that the SE-network rolling migration to CommonMark has landed at RPG. You can see that link for more details, but for the most part you should expect no real changes—and only when writing/editing things from this point forward, everything from before now should fall in one of three categories:
It worked as it was and nothing changed or needed changing.
The source needed slight tweaking to achieve the results they previously had, and these changes were automatically applied.
The source needed more significant tweaking that could not be automatically applied, and so the question or answer will have its source left alone but continue to display a cached version of the result, so it still looks the same as before. Anyone editing it will need to adjust things, however, as the old source code won’t produce the result it used to (and by editing you are removing the cached version by definition).
Case 3 scenarios are supposed to be rare; most everything should fall under 1 and 2. Nothing should fall outside these cases, which means nothing should have its outward appearance changed in the slightest. (Report any changes in the actual appearance of things as a bug.)
As such, there is no need to edit anything in response to this update. Every question and answer should look exactly as it did before, so no edit is necessary. The only exceptions would be if there was an outright bug that messed something up, so every edit in response to this should be accompanied by a bug report. Please do not spam the front page with unnecessary edits like removing no-longer-necessary comments.
The automatic changes in case 2 were a one-time thing, so going forward, you may need to adjust your editing somewhat. There aren’t a lot of changes, though.
Some of the biggest things that did change:
Headers without spaces
There is a slight change in how headers work:
###Header
###Header
This no longer works: there now must be a space between the hashtags/pound signs and the text of the header, like this:
### Header
Header
(This is the one I noticed that prompted this discussion; I don’t really like it but oh well. I’ll adjust.)
Multiple box quotes
How multiple quoted lines in a box quote is handled changed a bit:
> one
> another
one
another
The blank line between them now makes these two lines two separate quote boxes. Useful for when you want multiple quote boxes (since before you had to abuse an HTML comment, <!---->
, to achieve this), but most of the time you’re probably going to want one box. To achieve that, you need a >
on the blank line too:
> one
>
> another
one
another
Continuing bullet points in lists
Indentation requirements on extending bullet points in lists have gotten stricter, where before they were lenient but rather quirky.
* these
lines
- these
lines
This used to work, where the single-space indent on lines
would have it included in the same bullet point (but separate paragraph) as * these
. The actual number of spaces you needed and when the next level in was triggered were rather quirky. Now, you have to actually match your indentation on further lines to where the text started for the original bullet.
* these
lines
these
lines