Comment by greggman3

Hmmm,

* Markdown in HTML. NO!!! That would drive me crazy. I use HTML all the time for diagrams. If I had to be aware of every tiny place where my content in the diagram was going to get munged by the markdown parser I'd tear my hair out.

* * vs - I've used * my entire life for lists, decades before markdown existed. Never heard of using - for lists until yaml

* auto numbered lists. NO!

The problem is it's nearly impossible to keep your formatting right if you have a long item lists. I often write answers on s.o. where it's like "You have 3 issues. 1. several paragraphs 2. several more paragraphs and code samples. It would be absolute hell to have to figure out the formatting to make sure auto numbered item 2 stayed 2 and didn't become 1 in a new list

* code block indentation - agreed that code fences are generally better. Worse most places I enter markdown (stackoverflow) don't have any indenting/outdenting editor controls which makes it really painful. Either I had to manually indent 5 to 50 lines or else edit outside stack overflow and paste in. I know stackoverflow has Ctrl-K but it doesn't work once you take in account the list indentation issues.

* no syntax for adding classes

I don't mind that. It kind of feels like part of the point. If I need a class I use embedded html although that's another place to rant. Inline HTML uses markdown where as self contained HTML does not. I'd prefer they both didn't. In other words. If you put

    The big <span style="color: red">*bear*</span>

you'll get a italic red 'bear' but if you put

    <div>The big <span style="color: red">*bear*</span></div>

You'll get red '<asterisk>bear</asterisk>'

Ok, I give up. no idea how to put an asterisk on HN. >:(

As mentioned above I'd have preferred no markdown in HTML as it's bitten me quite often trying to color code variables in a math description that uses * and having the * get eaten by being parsed.

* Ids - The id thing does bug me too. Markdown generates ids based on headlines but that's way too brittle. Edit the headline and your ids break. I also wish auto-numbered footnotes were a standard feature that worked by id so I could do something like [-fn-](#someid) and later #fn-someid paragraph a it would insert [<num>] at the top and link to #fn-someid at the bottom.