Configure how comments are rendered

You can use the Markup section in your configuration file to influence how the Markdown syntax in comments is rendered and displayed to the user.

Per Isso’s defaults, commenters can use standard Markdown syntax, minus footnotes and tables (see below on how to activate them).

Because users can enter untrusted, potentially malicious text into the comment box, Isso applies some safety precautions so that the rendered comments do not contain e.g. malware <script> tags or iframes. You should not blindly change these defaults to allow more elements without knowing what you are doing.

Plain HTML in comments

Per Isso’s defaults, commenters can also enter plain HTML instead of or inside of Markdown text.

To disallow user-entered plain HTML, add skip-html to [markup] flags.

These HTML tags are allowed by default: <a>, <blockquote>, <br>, <code>, <del>, <em>, <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, <h6>, <hr>, <ins>, <li>, <ol>, <p>, <pre>, <strong>, <table>, <tbody>, <td>, <th>, <thead>, <ul>.

These HTML attributes allowed by default: align (for tables) and href (for <a href="...">)

Elements and attributes not in the allowed list will just be stripped. <foo bar=1>text</foo> will simply become text.

Note

Keep in mind that removing an element from the allowed tags will not only disallow commenters from entering it as a plain HTML tag, but also remove formatting from any markdown that would generate the tag.

An example: Allowed elements are ['a', 'strong']. Then Some *text* would not be rendered in italics since the em element would be forbidden.

Line breaks

By default, Markdown requires two new lines to create a paragraph break. E.g. this block:

This is a quite **long paragraph** that spans multiple lines,
which is split over multiple lines in the Markdown source code.

Thus, the width remains under about 80 characters and the writer does not
have to scroll so far to the right.

will be rendered as:

This is a quite long paragraph that spans multiple lines, which is split over multiple lines in the Markdown source code.

Thus, the width remains under about 80 characters and the writer does not have to scroll so far to the right.

Set hard-wrap in [markup] flags to only require a single newline to create a line break (<br>):

One line.
Another line.

will then be rendered as:

One line.

Another line.

Defaults and available options

Note

Make sure to use e.g. fenced-code (with a - dash) instead of fenced_code (underline) to refer to extension names.

The following behavior is enabled by default:

Explanation	Extension name
Automatically convert http:// links and email addresses into clickable links, even if commenters did not format them using [text](http://link.site)	autolink
Blocks that are surrounded by triple backticks (```) at the beginning and at the end are rendered as code blocks, without needing to be indented.	fenced-code
Text surrounded in two ~ gets a line through: Text ~~deleted~~ → Text deleted	strikethrough
Text after the ^ character is rendered as “superscript”: Intelligence^2 → Intelligence2.	superscript

The following additional options are available:

Explanation	Extension name
Ignore indented code blocks	disable-indented-code
Ignore inline LaTeX-style math blocks, such as inline $equations$ or display $$equations$$, allowing them to be processed separately with a JavaScript library. Note: This extension will not render equations or any form of math, it just marks them to be ignored by the markdown parser. A library such as MathJax or KaTeX is needed for that.	math
Normally, everything between two _underscores_ would be rendered with emphasis. This option disables parsing of underscores within words. A_good_day → A_good_day, not Agoodday	no-intra-emphasis
Parse markdown footnotes. Not recommended because multiple footnotes by different commenters on the same page could clash due to duplicate links to footnotes.	footnotes
Use two = signs like ==this== to highlight text.	highlight
Text inside quotes gets a special “quote” class. Perhaps useful for styling in CSS	quote
Enable Markdown tables. Note: The <tr> and all other <table>-related tags need to be allowed under allowed-elements for this to work. Also, a table cannot be surrounded by anything other than blank lines to render properly.	tables
Instead of _underscore resulting in emphasis, the resulting text will be… underlined.	underline

See also

The flask-misaka docs also have a good explanation of what each extension options does.