this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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[–] perishthethought@lemm.ee 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

When is Lemmy going to fix spoiler tags?

Sheesh!

[–] maccentric@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Works for me on Voyager, what app are you using?

[–] perishthethought@lemm.ee 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)
[–] maccentric@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I don’t have Sync but I fired up Mlem and Avelon and they both also botched the spoiler tag. It doesn’t appear like it should be too hard to implement, wonder what’s going on?

[–] sjmarf@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Mlem dev here! Lemmy has a custom "flavor" of Markdown that is distinct from other social media platforms. Open-source markdown parsers and renderers exist for popular flavors of Markdown (e.g GitHub-flavor), but not for Lemmy-flavor. Most Lemmy clients choose to use an existing GitHub-flavor parser that is close enough to Lemmy's to be indistinguishable in most cases. Mlem uses swift-markdown-ui to render markdown, which uses cmark-gfm as its parser.

Lemmy's spoiler format is unique to Lemmy-flavor markdown, so that's one of the places where use of a third-party markdown parser is noticed by users. Other common parsing errors are ~subscript~ and footnotes.

Adding spoiler support is not particularly easy, unfortunately. You can't really apply spoiler-parsing logic on-top of another markdown parser - it has to be integrated into the parser itself. This is because the app needs to ignore spoiler markdown in certain situations, such as inside of a code block. The only good option is to write a custom markdown parser from scratch, or modify an existing markdown parser to support Lemmy's markdown dialect. Both options can be difficult for developers for several reasons:

  • cmark-gfm is written in C, which the developer of the Lemmy client may not be familiar with.
  • If the app is using a third-party renderer, and not just a parser, that renderer also needs to be rewritten to support the new parsing logic.

This takes a significant amount of time for comparatively little value for users, so most client developers didn't prioritise it.

In an upcoming Mlem version, we're replacing our markdown parser renderer with a custom one that can render spoilers and subscripts, but we've got a way to go before we achieve full parity with Lemmy. If any developers of other apps are using cmark-gfm, you're welcome to use our code from that repo under the terms of the licence.

Sorry this is kinda long, I hope this answers your question

[–] maccentric@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago

Great info, thanks!

[–] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

This right here is why I love you guys. Someone posted a bug, and we already have two people testing said bug, and giving reports within 30 minutes of the bug report.

Never change Lemmy :)

[–] Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 months ago

Boost also has yet to implement spoiler tags.

[–] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

I just checked it on Sync for Lemmy, and it showed as a blue block till I clicked it. I'm using a Galaxy S10e.