Markdown support?

Currently LtU offers the input options "Plain Text + HTML" and "HTML". I have grown to find them rather irritating for several reasons:

- having to manually use HTML escape codes for < and > makes some things almost unusable for me (this comes a lot in the current Frank discussion). It is painful to write, and painful to read back when editing a post.
- the syntax for inline code, namely <code>..&lt/code> is goofy and impractical in practice, compared to `...` in Markdown.
- other parts of the HTML syntax have less overhead, but still prevent me from using them more often: links and lists come to mind. (As I'm writing this, I realize that I am writing a textual list. I'll leave it as is for the example, although I would usually rewrite my posts in full <ul><li>...</li><li>...</li><ul> clad.)

(some form of) Markdown has gathered consensus among websites that expect user comments, for example Github and Reddit. I would be very happy if we could have a Markdown input option in LtU. Because it does "the right thing" with text by default, and also supports raw HTML fragments, I think this option should be the default.

P.S.: Ehud, in 2010 you were of the opinion that technical information on the website platform are off-topic, even in the "Site operations discussions" forum. Is it still the case? I started by looking for technical information on where the site's source could be found, to see if I could consider contributing Markdown support myself (or at least evaluate the effort that would be involved), but was unable to find any information. Would you consider sharing a bit of information on the site's internals to encourage people to lend a hand from times to times?

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Hacks

For the time being you can write bad HTML:

<li>one
<li>two
<li>three

and you only need to escape <, then > will be displayed verbatim.

Heh

I almost forgot that a long time ago the HTML syntax was also designed to be written by humans. Language topics where we wouldn't expect them!

The site runs on Drupal,

The site runs on Drupal, with not a lot of hacks beyond that. Anton is indeed the one doing the work, and I myself no precious little about it. I don't think these issues are verboten only that they shouldn't drown discussions about programming languages...