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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Just spotted this on the GitHub blog, posted 33 minutes ago: https://github.blog/changelog/2022-06-28-fenced-block-syntax...

> Users can now delineate mathematical expressions using ```math fenced code block syntax in addition to the already supported delimiters.

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I really don't like overloading ```X as a way to render the output of running the code, because now you have no way to display a block of raw mermaid or math code which is the whole point of ``` in the first place. I would be much happier if they introduced a syntax variation to enable this feature more generally instead of overloading the purpose of backticks, something like ```!X (```!math or ```!mermaid) for "run the contents as X and render the output in the document".

I was confused about your comment at first - I was sure it was already a feature where you could use ```X to render the contents with a language. E.g. you could go ```java or ```javascript and get syntax highlighting for that language.

What you're saying is since ```mermaid now renders a mermaid diagram, there isn't a way to display a block of raw mermaid code with syntax highlighting.

That's a very valid point.

They could add a ```mermaid-source tag.

I agree my comment was difficult to understand, so I edited it to hopefully make it better. Thank you!

KeenWrite[1] uses a "diagram-" prefix for text-based diagrams[2]. What's needed is a standards body for Markdown[3]. GitHub should not be imposing de facto standards.

[1]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite

[2]: https://kroki.io/

[3]: https://talk.commonmark.org/

The simple fix for this is that you should use "```math render" or some such, the language is specified as the first word with everything after the space up to the newline currently ignored...

> everything after the space up to the newline currently ignored

Oh I didn't know that, that's perfect!

The big advantage of using code blocks is that is guarantees that their sanitizer doesn't mess with the contents. This is a pretty big plus.

Also, you can of course still have mermaid code blocks; just don't put `mermaid` after the three backticks. The code block won't have any syntax highlighting, but in the case of `math`, this wouldn't make sense anyway.

I wonder if the initial choice to $ and $$ syntax was to keep the syntax identical to VSCode's built-in KaTeX rendering for Markdown preview? You'd think that they could just port over the VSCode implementation directly which already works quite well without most of the inconsistency issues in the website's MathJax counterpart, especially considering that VSCode is their own Electron product too.

This is great news! It's not working for me quite yet, but I'm refreshing my browser every 5 minutes. Next stop: Proper inline math.

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