Markdown everywhere
Now, finally, we can even use Markdown on our anonymous Write.as posts.
We'd debated adding this for a while, but hesitated because there are simply so many posts on the platform with various formatting, and we'd rather not break things. So we considered:
- Adding an option to the editor to enable Markdown in a post. But adding another option or button isn't ideal.
- Making all existing anonymous posts render as Markdown. With over 30,000 of them, that's a pretty big impact.
- Making new posts past a certain date render as Markdown. This has privacy implications for writers ultra-sensitive to it, but also just isn't an elegant solution.
- Letting the viewer or link-sharer choose how to see the post. This is where we're at today.
So now you can add .md to your post URLs to view them a different way. If you'd like readers to see them that way too, share the URL with .md included at the end.
Here are all of our supported extensions, in case you didn't know!
| Extension | How it displays | Content type |
|---|---|---|
| none | Plain, whitespace-respecting text on a nice page | text/html |
| .md | Formatted, whitespace-respecting text on a nice page | text/html |
| .txt | Plain text | text/plain |
| .json | Plain text with special Content-Type | application/json |
| .xml | Plain text with special Content-Type | application/xml |
| .css | Plain text with special Content-Type | text/css |