Comment formatting

Comments posted by email or through the user interface are stored in plain text. However, to leverage the formatting capabilities of modern browsers, comments can include basic formatting through the use of the popular language, Markdown.

Markdown supports all the common document objects from a simple, text syntax, for example, headings, numbered and unnumbered (bullet) lists, links, bold, and italic. A key design objective of Markdown is that the raw format is unobtrusive.

In fact, many people use Markdown conventions when they type email or plain text documents. These include asterisks around *inline text* for emphasis (formatted as inline text), or a number and full stop for a numbered list:

1. Some text.

2. Some more text.

These are transformed by Markdown into a more typographically correct list like the following:

1. Some text.
2. Some more text.