You can, but maybe you shouldn't. Given that this post is in the fediverse community, I don't feel too bad about mentioning that Lemmy is part of a federated network with PieFed and MBIN (I try not to bollock on too much about the platform I happen to be using).
In the ActivityPub JSON for this post, there is no indication that this field contains MarkDown. If anything, it says the opposite, it says it contains HTML. It's therefore not unreasonable for other platforms to render it as such.
Given this, and the poor support for mobile clients indicated in the comments, and the fact that it's only a subset of MarkDown tags, but include ones that aren't part of CommonMark standard, I'd argue that it's not necessarily a good idea.
In the ActivityPub JSON for this post, there is no indication that this field contains MarkDown. If anything, it says the opposite, it says it contains HTML. It’s therefore not unreasonable for other platforms to render it as such.
Actually, the name property is explicitly plain text, it shouldn't contain any type of markup, whether that be markdown or HTML.
For clarity, I wasn't intending to say that PieFed treats that field as HTML (it treats it as text), I just meant that if you were looking at that JSON, and being a bit lazy like me and not looking at specs, then it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that the 'mediaType' field also refers to 'name' (rather than a 'content' field which this post doesn't happen to have).
Anyway, this seems to be even more reason why MD shouldn't be put in titles, and front-ends shouldn't be encouraging the practise by rendering it.
Also, this gives me real text-on-image-in-Facebook-post-just-to-get-noticed vibes.
If everybody can use Markdown in their post titles, then everybody will use Markdown in their post titles, until it's a mess of colors, bold, and italics.
Markdown is plain text, so it's fine to go in the field. It's also fine for apps to allow OP's post to look like garbage because there's no requirement for support.
A comment here distinguishes between the 'plain text' that's allowed by the spec, and MarkDown as a markup language (it's confusingly named, I guess, but that's what Wikipedia categorises it as too)
Another commenter (who's contributed code to Lemmy) pointed to a link that provides the specification for that field: "A simple, human-readable, plain-text name for the object. HTML markup MUST NOT be included."
So in this case, it's more that the JSON looks a bit ambiguous: 'mediaType' is only referring to the format of the text in a post's body, but - unlike me - you'd also need to be aware of the spec to know that it doesn't apply to the title.
I think it's fine to use unique platform features like this, but if you're actually using this actively, be aware that not everyone will see your titles as you intended them. It's only Lemmy users that can see it actually render "properly", everyone else just sees the plaintext Markdown symbols.
Be careful of the character limit on each viewer, as they can "trim" your title in the middle of some markup tag and just display part of it as the title.
I still have installed a dozen or so clients, so I opened Voyager to remind myself what it is in comparison to Jerboa, which is also my preferred client.
Suddenly my android device has an iOS user interface. To me, this is lazy development. I'm sure it's fine for someone accustomed to it, but even having a static header and footer seem out of date.
FOSSDLE PieFed
You can, but maybe you shouldn't. Given that this post is in the fediverse community, I don't feel too bad about mentioning that Lemmy is part of a federated network with PieFed and MBIN (I try not to bollock on too much about the platform I happen to be using).
In the ActivityPub JSON for this post, there is no indication that this field contains MarkDown. If anything, it says the opposite, it says it contains HTML. It's therefore not unreasonable for other platforms to render it as such.
Given this, and the poor support for mobile clients indicated in the comments, and the fact that it's only a subset of MarkDown tags, but include ones that aren't part of CommonMark standard, I'd argue that it's not necessarily a good idea.
Actually, the name property is explicitly plain text, it shouldn't contain any type of markup, whether that be markdown or HTML.
Oh, wow. Thanks.
For clarity, I wasn't intending to say that PieFed treats that field as HTML (it treats it as text), I just meant that if you were looking at that JSON, and being a bit lazy like me and not looking at specs, then it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that the 'mediaType' field also refers to 'name' (rather than a 'content' field which this post doesn't happen to have).
Anyway, this seems to be even more reason why MD shouldn't be put in titles, and front-ends shouldn't be encouraging the practise by rendering it.
Eh, I'll probably use italics tho, just like I did * in reddit.
Also, this gives me real text-on-image-in-Facebook-post-just-to-get-noticed vibes.
If everybody can use Markdown in their post titles, then everybody will use Markdown in their post titles, until it's a mess of colors, bold, and italics.
Markdown is plain text, so it's fine to go in the field. It's also fine for apps to allow OP's post to look like garbage because there's no requirement for support.
A comment here distinguishes between the 'plain text' that's allowed by the spec, and MarkDown as a markup language (it's confusingly named, I guess, but that's what Wikipedia categorises it as too)
Oh yea, I just mean that all markdown characters are ASCII, and thus allowed in a plain text field. 😉
This seems like a bug. Regardless of what clients may support, the json ought to accurately describe fields
Another commenter (who's contributed code to Lemmy) pointed to a link that provides the specification for that field: "A simple, human-readable, plain-text name for the object. HTML markup MUST NOT be included."
So in this case, it's more that the JSON looks a bit ambiguous: 'mediaType' is only referring to the format of the text in a post's body, but - unlike me - you'd also need to be aware of the spec to know that it doesn't apply to the title.
Do you know a way to see the ActivityPub JSON for fediverse objects?
you can use https://browser.pub I like it very much for that use case :)
Yes - it's easy to do from a command line. For this post, it would be:
curl --header 'accept: application/activity+json' --location https://lemmy.world/post/24241974 | jq .it looks like
Thanks, will try that out
Word of caution, it doesn't render on Connect for Lemmy.
Nor Boost. It does in Raccoon, though.
or in Jerboa
Works in Voyager!
Not for me
Boom.
Hmm, but the best part about markdown is that it is human readable regardless so it should still be fine
i am not human
Or Thunder
Renders fine in Sync
Renders in Summit, but I turned that off because any post title starting with
#is rendered as h1.If you have markdown on your title, then is not being rendered by Jerboa.
Do you also have the Android weirdness in which the tick marks appear to be in a different place? (Not Jerboa-specific)
The tick marks appear correctly for me.
Sync for lemmy works
You can also edit them after the fact unlike other platforms
What good is it for if I can’t change post title font to Comic Sans.
ABSOLUTELY NOTHIN
Good god, ya'll.
@amon@lemmy.world Doesn't render it on Mbin
(unlike Reddit, for example)
I use bold and italic a lot in post titles. Some of the other stuff wouldn't make much sense I don't think, but every little bit helps.
I mean,
codecould work and maybe ^superscript^ or ~subscript~ and that's about it I thinkCan you create headings in headings?
You can, and it'll probably get annoying if everyone catches on!
OK, I will never use it again.
~oh no~
Are sub and superscript officially supported by markdown now? Or is that a Lemmy-specific extension?
Lemmy-ui uses
markdown-it: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/blob/main/package.json#L65Markdown-it follows the CommonMark spec with extensions: https://spec.commonmark.org/current/ As I see superscript is not part of the spec, but listed in the markdown-it readme as a plugin, so I guess it's coming from there: https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it?tab=readme-ov-file#syntax-extensions
They are also listed in package.json:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/blob/main/package.json#L73
Lemmy docs about markdown support: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/02-media.html#text
I think it's fine to use unique platform features like this, but if you're actually using this actively, be aware that not everyone will see your titles as you intended them. It's only Lemmy users that can see it actually render "properly", everyone else just sees the plaintext Markdown symbols.
Hmm, sounds like a good point. Here's my sub:
https://lemm.ee/c/eurographicnovels
Can you tell me how our formatting might be messing search engines and stuff..?
Oh no
Oh no indeed
I'd settle for good spelling and grammar. Once most posters have mastered that, let them play with the formatting.
Be careful of the character limit on each viewer, as they can "trim" your title in the middle of some markup tag and just display part of it as the title.
Wow, amazing
Lol apparently you can't
Guess it depends on your client because it works for me.
Works for me on Sync.
What client do you use?
Jerboa. Its awful but there's nothing better
Voyager
I still have installed a dozen or so clients, so I opened Voyager to remind myself what it is in comparison to Jerboa, which is also my preferred client.
Suddenly my android device has an iOS user interface. To me, this is lazy development. I'm sure it's fine for someone accustomed to it, but even having a static header and footer seem out of date.
I'll stick with Jerboa for the time being.
It wasn't just the UI. There was something else broken about it since I last tried it.
I'm pretty sure there's a preference to not be iPhone UI
Thunder, Eternity, Connect, Summit?
https://www.lemmyapps.com/
I'll try eternity, thanks. None of the others are on fdroid
Thunder is in the IzzyOnDroid repo you can add it in fdroid