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HN isn’t a web standard.

The markup that it uses for comments should use one though - and apparently it does! Others have mentioned that it uses a subset of CommonMark as mentioned in your post's sibling comments.

Thanks

The page with HN's formatting options is a bit hidden (in the FAQ). I'm not surprised people don't know about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

I'd say that CommonMark is a pretty widely-utilized standard defining formatting including `inline code` snippets.

Gotcha, didn't realize it was standardized. I feel like I heard about CommonMark when it first was announced and I more or less wrote it off as another markup format, but thanks for the clarification.

My poor little internet points <\3 sorry HN for the unforgivable offense of asking a benign question

CommonMark is some kind of standard, and HN’s current syntax is a subset of it.