@taschenorakel But it would be weird to be able to use markdown in a client but not in the browser. I really don't understand why this is such a big problem. @MastodonEngineering
@jwildeboer In short: it requires a refactor of the whole message parsing & generation code. AP messages are HTML, so you need to transform this Markdown to HTML, safely and efficiently. But if the user then wants to edit their post, you need to show them the Markdown again.
Glitch SOC does it in a problematic way, and we explored alternatives without (yet) figuring out an obvious path for having it in Mastodon.
So you simply limit the supported Markdown to a subset that's recoverable from HTML without loss. Additionally you could embed helpful information using HTML5 attributes or XML namespaces.
But actually: Unless you permit really fancy stuff, converting forward and back isn't that hard. The original Markdown.pl was just a handful regular expressions wrapped in plenty of comments and a little bit of Perl.