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parse markdown in descriptions #291
Description
Context
Some descriptions contain hyperlinks, relics of an era when we were accepting Airtable submissions, which had rich text formatting. They don't look too bad—they're just expanded, as one must do with plaintext. Markdown is designed to look reasonable in its un-parsed state...but we might as well deal with it!
Requirements
- properties which could conceivably contain markdown:
- data_sources.description
- data_requests.submission_notes
- data_requests.internal_notes
- data_requests.pdap_response
- parse markdown URLs
- convert any headers to a sensible size within the page hierarchy; i.e. if we're already using h3 for "Description", we should be using h4, h5 for the headers. If we ever have too many levels of hierarchy in the markdown, we can compress them all into h6.
- nice-to-have: on submission forms, is there any way we could allow the submission of hyperlinks? I don't want to get into rich-text editing, but markdown is nice...
Activity
joshuagraber commentedon Mar 24, 2025
Thanks @josh-chamberlain. A couple responses here:
I'm inclined to just parse to
h6, as the logic to parse the page and determine where we are in the hierarchy seems like it could get complex. But I'll play with it and see if there's a relatively low-impact solution.Markdown content is just a string, so we should already be set up to accept MD links in forms, once we do the work in this issue to parse them into HTML. Or did you mean the kind of markdown editing with preview that GitHub does? This is a form of rich-text editing, just with MD. I'm not opposed to it, but it would add significant complexity.
josh-chamberlain commentedon Mar 30, 2025
@joshuagraber
Makes sense.
I meant the rich-text editing, just for links. Definitely seems too complex to add right now. We could issue a tiny instruction or note about how to format links, though!