launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Barry Warsaw <barry@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Nov 18, 2011, at 07:35 PM, Martin Pool wrote:

> * There's a lot of existing text in Launchpad that was entered with
>no concept of it being rendered as markup, which may look weird if we
>change it that way.  I propose to handle it by, in the first instance,
>seeing how much of it does actually look bad.  If it's a serious
>problem, then we can update the database to put everything affected in
>to a literal block.  Or, we can perhaps do some schema change to say
>"this text is pre-markup" but that seems like it's going to need lots
>of one-off changes.

I think the way to handle this, and also allow room for future adoption of
additional markup languages, is to include a Content-Type like value
designating the style of markup being used.  PEPs for example have exactly
this header to designate plain text (i.e. pre-markup) or reST.

This value can even be hidden for now and just hard-coded to either plain text
for existing text or text/x-markdown for newly entered text.

The proposal sounds really good to me, and I agree it would be a nice first
step toward wikis (second step: version control those editable text blocks).

-Barry