squirrelitude: (Default)
squirrelitude ([personal profile] squirrelitude) wrote in [site community profile] dw_dev 2020-06-26 09:52 pm (UTC)

This looks great! Couple of questions:

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1) What happens if you find a security issue in an older formatter and need to overhaul or replace the implementation? (Perhaps the implementation is so broken it *can't* be fixed, and needs replacement.)

Can DW reasonably do a search to sample for posts and comments where the change makes a meaningful difference in output? And what happens if there's a discrepancy?

Technically, your proposal wouldn't change this situation all that much, since DW *already* has this problem. But it might offer more solutions. For example, you could "clone" markdown1 as markdown1_pre_20210101, set old markdown1 posts to use it, and fix markdown1 in place. If new posts are *forbidden* from using markdown1_pre_20210101, and editing an old post bearing that formatter switches it to markdown1 so that people can't use them to host exploits, then you could have your cake and eat it too...

This would be more complexity, and I'm not suggesting it's a great idea, but I think it's worth considering how that might play out. Old libraries sometimes have to be entirely replaced, and those corner cases can be *hard* to replicate.

(Another possibility is rendering all the old content to HTML in order to freeze it, and storing that alongside the source markup.)

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2) You write about the scenario where someone edits an old post:

« The exception is if you're editing older content that uses a legacy format. In that case, the menu includes the active formats PLUS the post's existing format, so you don't have to update all formatting within the post just to make a minor change. »

What happens if I edit an old post and change the format selector to a newer format, and realize I've made a mistake and actually need it to go back to the deprecated format? Will the selector still show the *previous/original* format?

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