Adding a "/" to a drive

[gerbil]

More fun with Markdown. To denote all files, folders in H: drive one seems to have to type two backslashes, so:
Typing H:\* gives H:* in the post.
and H:\ \* gives H:\*
And you wouldn't believe the fun I had typing that. What I had to type is totally different to what is posted, but what is posted is what I want you to see. Got it? Have a play...
Hint. To get that H:\ \* I had to type H: \ \ and \ \* sep by a space.
And to get that hint to post? Oh, my gawd....

[Ancient Dragon]

just H:\\* (that's five \ characters with no spaces) The 5th \ is to escape the * so that markup doesn't use * for other purposes while editing.

[gerbil]

Markdown is a pain. You gotta agree, AD...
Edit Post button gets a workout.

[TrustyTony]

Use Inline Code (backticking), less painfull than escapes: glob pattern H:\\*

[deceptikon]

Markdown is a pain.

I still haven't decided yet if Markdown's finickiness is an improvement over BBCode's verbosity, but there's no argument here that both can be a pain.

[Dani]

I think they each have their own strengths and weaknesses, but I decided to switch for 3 reasons:

1. Davey would be able to tell me if I'm right or wrong, but I feel like Markdown is much better for our editorial markup. It's just overall simpler and more intuitive to create, and read, news stories and product reviews with Markdown vs BBCode. (Note: No edge cases, code, or weird symbols required.) I now turn to Davey to ask if he is in agreement?? ...
2. While Markdown is great for editorial, it also has its strengths when relating to a programming audience. Yes, things like the backslash are silly, but just the idea of a backslash being used for escape, and the way tabbing works, makes the system well-designed for technical documents. Even though there's a steep learning curve, I think that the markup language plays well with a programmer's thought process (compared to BBCode which is aimed at the non-techie.) As AD pointed out the other day, there are some other issues such as whitespace collapsing in inline code tags which didn't happen with BBCode. However, again, Markdown caters to a programmer audience in the sense that it behaves strictly according to the W3C standard for HTML, and it makes complete sense to a modern web developer. BBCode was more intuitive for non-technical people, and behaved the way that they would expect it to be have, I guess. Regardless, it's a huge breath of fresh air for moderators to not be fixing code snippets every 10 seconds.
3. As we all know, Stack Overflow uses Markdown, and so does Github. A growing number of other sites based on user-generated content are using it as well, so I think it's robust and solid enough to go mainstream. For those of you who have been keeping up, you know that standardization is VERY important to me. The fact that Stack Overflow has had limited success with their other non-technical Stack Exchange sites is enough proof of concept for me that Markdown could be used relatively issue-free by our Windows tech support forums that cater to non-programmers.

[WaltP]

If you've ever written C/C++, it's no different than writing a string. You just have to remember that * is also escaped...

In C: it's http:\\\\*, in markdown it's http:\\\\\*.

So what's the big deal? ;-)

[gerbil]

I understand all that [except most of what Dani wrote... :(], and I would expect it inside a code segment. But for text passages cannot it be verbatim, slash for slash, * for *, a for apple? Be mindful that many/most who come here for help expect to see what they type in the post; if they coded, or knew html likely they wouldn't be visiting.
I don't live coding.

[deceptikon]

But for text passages cannot it be verbatim, slash for slash, * for *, a for apple?

It could, yes. But then how would you propose we support bold and italic, or the other formatting features using a character that would need to be escaped? Before we had to do this:

[b]this is bold text[/b]

And now we do this:

*this is bold text*

In exactly the same way the noparse tags from BBCode were necessary to properly display [b], an escape is necessary to turn off formatting in Markdown. Somehow I suspect that disallowing any formatting whatsoever outside of code tags, or making the formatting language so awkward that nobody would use it accidentally would go over badly compared to requiring some form of escape for our formatting language.

I don't live coding.

It's a fairly simple matter to learn the rules of Markdown, you don't need to be a programmer at all.

[gerbil]

We need a key that nobody would ever use for anything else. Like that opening apostrophe on the key with the tilde. Nobody uses that....
I'm laughing.

[deceptikon]

Like that opening apostrophe on the key with the tilde. Nobody uses that....

We already use that for inline code.

[WaltP]

We need a key that nobody would ever use for anything else. Like that opening apostrophe on the key with the tilde. Nobody uses that....

Well, why don't you design a better language for marking text? When it's working, you can probably make a lot of $$ selling it.

[gerbil]

Cos all I do is try to type posts. I don't make aeroplanes, either. Nor do I fly them.
I think my point is that I am highly uninterested in learning something for one rare application.