Looks like Mastodon will be getting expanded support for showing styles in posts. Micro.blog already sends bold, italics, and other basics to Mastodon, so this will be a nice improvement for folks reading in Mastodon.

@manton This is great news for the Fediverse and blogging in general.

@manton Good news!

@manton I wasn’t clear from the thread if this will include links, ie Markdown formatted links. Do you know?

@manton Oh, niccce!

@manton This is a great day!

@davew what do you say about this? It looks like Mastodon is pivoting to rendering more HTML tags.

One of the reasons I saw someone make is that HTML is accessible, but a jumble of chars like _,*, and > signs are wholly inaccessible for screen readers.

@Ciantic @manton

honestly -- i think they should do markdown.

@davew @manton HTML is accessible but Markdown isn't.

Markdown is perhaps fine for modifying text, but I've seen just few days ago a complaint about Markdown for screen readers, it's horrible.

Hearing out loud Multiply ... Multiply... gets really boring really quick.

Mastodon already uses HTML for rendering most things, and it's perfect for screen readers. This is a hill I'm ready to die on 😊

@Ciantic @davew @manton

On my instance, which runs a fork called Glitch-soc, I can, via profile setting, use one of plain text, HTML, or markdown.

I prefer plaintext, have barely explored the HTML tags, and do not like markdown.

YMMV.

@SpaceLifeForm @davew @manton That makes sense. Plaintext without any Markdown is probably the easiest to consume if you don't need formatting.

But when formatting is required well formed HTML is better for consuming with screen readers than Markdown formatting.

Simply because most screen-readers have robust support for basic HTML tags such as strong-tag, and em-tag.

Whereas Markdown-like jumble of *, _ > characters are a difficult problem for screen readers as they don't have meaning alone.

@manton Thank you. I’m sorry if I missed that somewhere.

While I am writing, I have the iOS v3.0 beta running on my phone with notifications enabled. However, I’m not receiving any notifications. I have re-installed but no luck. Any thoughts?

@manton No sooner do I write than I think that I have fixed it.