In a comment I wrote, I was surprised to see something I didn't write showing up, in the form of a third dot.
So, where did the third dot come from?
Well, markdown-it has an extension where "typographic replacements" are done. You can see them all in action here (tick typographer on and off).
So, wherever two or more dots are written, even if around quotes, three dots will be rendered ('..' => '..')
While it may seem nice, this is more trouble than good IMHO. Not to mention the fact that people using other apps, utilizing other markdown implementations, will not see what others see (which is why some of you probably had no idea what the hell I was talking about at the start of this post).
It is my opinion that use of non-standard markdown extensions should be kept to a minimum, or preferably not used at all. And since a new UI is going to be written (which may open the possibility to use a high-quality markdown Rust crate), this should be a deliberate implementation choice going forward.
Would I? Yea ... I'm always inclined to use escape backticks in markdown actually. Basically anytime I'd be using or reading the relevant text in a programmatic/ASCII/monospace environment. I even use them to signify verbatim quotations. I find myself holding back on lemmy though because their styling can be a tad gaudy.
In the case of a unix path, yea I almost always would escape that with backticks. I do appreciate your angst at seeing the rendering of the path.
I'm not sure much of markdown is common knowledge apart from the basics. I think most people kinda fumble through the weirdness and idiosyncrasies of any particular flavour without caring too much about it in the end. But no, I don't think the specific replacements would be common knowledge. But I do think many would react pleasantly at most of them, in part because I don't think they're foreign in the text formatting space.
For me the main replacements I have a major problem with is reducing multiple question and exclamation points down to 3. That seems unnecessary to me. Though, to be clear, I'm not fond of the ellipsis substitution either. As for the rest, the only ones I like are the n-dash and m-dash substitutions and the quotation marks. The rest I'd classify as cute and unnecessary and the sort of thing that, if desirable, ought to be left to special syntax for special characters.
As for whether lemmy should use markdown-it ... I'm thinking it isn't a big issue and these replacements are just a particular flavour's idiosyncrasies that most are happy to deal with.
Two issues I'd raise though: