Allow disabling markdown quotes

[prez]

Platform: web
Version: most recent

I am opening this as a bug, because in my eyes, it is. Please add a setting to disable the rendering of
>quotes as rich text, similar to the emoji setting.
I don't think I am exaggerating when I say that a lot of users find those are awful, and just want plaintext arrows instead.

[turt2live]

Sorry, we currently support markdown for messages and don't have an interest in using our own markdown specification. As a workaround, there is the /plain command which doesn't use any markdown processing.

[prez]

using our own markdown specification.

What?

You thought it was reasonable to disable the extra rendering for emojis, why not for quotes?

[turt2live]

Emoji has nothing to do with markdown? And I don't think we have an option to turn off emojis...

[prez]

It has to do with the way text is rendered. I was talking about

Composer
-> Automatically replace plain text Emoji

And was asking for something similar ("automatically replace plain text quotes with markdown ones")
At any rate, please reconsider. I understand your point of view, but this would be a relatively easy way to improve riot-web for a lot of users. Thank you.

[t3chguy]

Automatically replace plain text Emoji

is something which happens on your interaction (when you press the space bar) and modifies your input field.

When you send the message, it gets parsed as markdown using the commonmark library, making changes to whether or not > is parsed by that library is not possible without literally creating our own markdown dialect and library to parse it for all 3 platforms.

[prez]

Yeah, I understand - the html is baked into the protocol:

 "msgtype": "m.text",
    "body": ">this",
    "format": "org.matrix.custom.html",
    "formatted_body": "<blockquote>\nthis\n</blockquote>\n"

It is reasonable to dismiss this request then.

Is there a way to enforce the sending of plain text messages on a server level?

[t3chguy]

It is not as the server doesn't get to see the content of encrypted rooms. It could be made such that a server converts all non-e2ee messages to plaintext

[prez]

Yes, that's not going to cut it. So one needs to disable it clientside.
In light of issues such as #4674 - could you please consider such an option?
Seemingly the markdown is not only annoying, it's also brittle and causes troubles elsewhere.

[t3chguy]

that is what /plain is for

[mureni]

For the record, when Discord went through this same discussion, they reached a compromise that most people found acceptable:

>text (with no space between the > and the following text) would render as plain, so as to not mess up certain text emojis or chan-style "greentext"
> text (with a space) would render as a markdown block quote

I don't think this abuses the intention or implementation of markdown while still allowing expected plaintext results. Recommend re-opening this.

[t3chguy]

The markdown is parsed by commonmark. If you want them to change the behaviour raise it with them.
element-hq/element-meta#330 is the issue about changing markdown parsers.