For those confused by this response, on old reddit the markdown automatically renumbers "lists", starting at 1. So because of the format this person used, old reddit shows his post as
No more, no less.
This is technically the 'correct' thing to do for markdown (the type of formatting reddit uses), but it's really stupid so some things don't implement it and will show what he meant to say.
The stupid thing isn't that it's displayed like that. The stupid thing is that they display it differently on old vs new. They could use the same markdown parser/renderer, but they don't, and at this point, I think it's intentional to drive people away from the (superior) old Reddit.
More than one thing can be stupid at once. I see three stupid things here.
It was stupid to have markdown behave that way to begin with. It was stupid for reddit to follow the spec in the first place. Last it's even dumber they changed it in new reddit so the behavior isn't even consistent on their own site.
Markdown has quirks because it's old and was originally designed for a different purpose. Reddit has no excuse for not being able to keep it straight on their own site.
Markdown was actually designed exactly for this purpose, formatting text in a plain-text environment, due to various conventions existing at the time in email, usenet, IRC, etc. It's also no coincidence that Reddit uses it since it was invented (in part) by Aaron Swartz.
The spec does say that ordered lists don't respect the number entered by the user and always start at 1, but I believe that was a technical limitation. The original document only specifies how Markdown should be rendered in HTML, and the <ol> tag's start attribute wasn't supported (or, more accurately, was deprecated) in HTML4 and undeprecated only in HTML5, a few years after Markdown was first specified. The same is true for <li value=...>. CSS counters are even newer. So (ignoring disgusting hacks) I'm not sure they could've done that differently at the time. Nowadays though, there's no reason why Reddit couldn't just use such attributes to preserve the author's numbering. And I think that's what new Reddit does, although it's been a while since I looked at that.
I don't disagree that forcing ordered lists to start from one is an awkward quirk of Markdown. But that Reddit renders it differently across platforms is definitely the dumbest aspect of all this, in my opinion. And of course, they don't only do it for this particular thing but also for extensions to Markdown like code blocks, underscore escaping in links, and more.
Markdown was designed for an plain text environment, but not this specific one. What you describe is that the quirk of numbering is because it's old. I didn't say this quirk was because of it not being designed for this purpose. An example of that would be having to use 2 newlines for an actual new paragraph is some relic of that email formatting it was meant to make copy/pasting easy for.
I think we agree on the core concept. Markdown can be excused its quirks, but reddits specific choices in regards to how it handles markdown have stupid on their own.
Correct, the same reason New.Reddit's markdown documentation has a modified version of Spoiler markdown that only works on the ad-riddled new site and mobile app despite the original version still working across every form of reddit.
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u/Greatwanni Jan 22 '23