I think users that are used to Markdown will often use single bold words as heading, and I feel hesitant to deviate too much from the standard Markdown conventions of how you should parse Markdown into HTML.
Don’t know where you got this notion from, but absolutely not. Markdown has syntax that’s used for headings, and I’ve never used bolded text as a replacement for a proper heading.
(As a wider point, Said Achmiz is as usual correct in his approach and it would be much appreciated if you didn’t inflict any more appalling HTML practices on API consumers)
We just serve the historical HTML for practical all posts, and all new HTML is really as straightforward HTML as you can imagine (with some exception for blockquotes, which we currently split into block-level elements, though that will be fixed soon). Happy to hear about any other problems you have with the HTML, but I am not aware of any.
Just because markdown has a heading syntax, doesn’t mean that everyone follows it, and depending on context you might not want to follow it. I literally googled “Markdown bold” and among the first few results this tutorial uses bolded headers as an example.
I literally googled “Markdown bold” and among the first few results this tutorial uses bolded headers as an example
Huh? I just went to that link; I don’t see where it says to use (or uses) bold-as-header.
Edit:
Just because markdown has a heading syntax, doesn’t mean that everyone follows it, and depending on context you might not want to follow it.
That not everyone follows it is, clearly, technically true (though I don’t at all share your impression of this practice’s prevalence). But I’m curious to know why you would ever not want to follow the heading syntax, if what you want to produce is a heading? (Other than cases of “this particular parser and/or renderer exhibits bizarre behavior, so I unfortunately have to produce non-standard Markdown in order for what I write to look sane when displayed”—but that, obviously, does not apply here, since we’re talking about determining what the parser and renderer do!)
I’m curious to know why you would ever not want to follow the heading syntax, if what you want to produce is a heading?
I’ve sometimes used regular bold for headings, I think mostly because it’s lower friction. I don’t need to think about what level of heading I should use semantically, or how that level actually renders.
But that’s not a heading, nor would it be correct to treat it as such! (Note that lower down on the page you linked, the tutorial specifies how to make actual headings!)
Oh, I think if a user enter that text into a text editor, they would prefer it to show up in the ToC rather than not. Or at the very least have the option to add it to a ToC (though I think if they had to choose, most users would prefer to add it).
I think that if a user is thinking about these sorts of things at all, then they can, should, and do have the capacity to make an actual heading element. (And if this is at all difficult or unintuitive in the UI, then that is the flaw that needs to be rectified!)
Don’t know where you got this notion from, but absolutely not. Markdown has syntax that’s used for headings, and I’ve never used bolded text as a replacement for a proper heading.
(As a wider point, Said Achmiz is as usual correct in his approach and it would be much appreciated if you didn’t inflict any more appalling HTML practices on API consumers)
We just serve the historical HTML for practical all posts, and all new HTML is really as straightforward HTML as you can imagine (with some exception for blockquotes, which we currently split into block-level elements, though that will be fixed soon). Happy to hear about any other problems you have with the HTML, but I am not aware of any.
Just because markdown has a heading syntax, doesn’t mean that everyone follows it, and depending on context you might not want to follow it. I literally googled “Markdown bold” and among the first few results this tutorial uses bolded headers as an example.
Huh? I just went to that link; I don’t see where it says to use (or uses) bold-as-header.
Edit:
That not everyone follows it is, clearly, technically true (though I don’t at all share your impression of this practice’s prevalence). But I’m curious to know why you would ever not want to follow the heading syntax, if what you want to produce is a heading? (Other than cases of “this particular parser and/or renderer exhibits bizarre behavior, so I unfortunately have to produce non-standard Markdown in order for what I write to look sane when displayed”—but that, obviously, does not apply here, since we’re talking about determining what the parser and renderer do!)
I’ve sometimes used regular bold for headings, I think mostly because it’s lower friction. I don’t need to think about what level of heading I should use semantically, or how that level actually renders.
Oops, sorry. Wrong link. I mean this one, together with this screenshot:
But that’s not a heading, nor would it be correct to treat it as such! (Note that lower down on the page you linked, the tutorial specifies how to make actual headings!)
Oh, I think if a user enter that text into a text editor, they would prefer it to show up in the ToC rather than not. Or at the very least have the option to add it to a ToC (though I think if they had to choose, most users would prefer to add it).
I think that if a user is thinking about these sorts of things at all, then they can, should, and do have the capacity to make an actual heading element. (And if this is at all difficult or unintuitive in the UI, then that is the flaw that needs to be rectified!)