What if email support Markdown formatting? | Hacker News Reader

What if email support Markdown formatting?

4 pointsxuanwo3 comments

  - No changes to protocols. Simply use markdown in the Content-Type.

  - No breaking changes. Clients that don't support markdown can display it as plain text.

  - Rendering can be performed on the client side. Users can apply their favorite CSS for the reading pane.

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While very popular and well-known by the tech community, markdown is very niche and unknown to the general public.

Fun fact: markdown's syntax was inspired by plain-text email conventions:

> ...the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.

https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

>Users can apply their favorite CSS for the reading pane

Tha sounds interesting and all ... but [practically] no one would do that

You already can write email in markdown, though ... because it's just text

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