@mrb yeah, but then you have to agree that this is useful for everyone. Since even _Markdown_ is not yet integrated... might take a while.

It is a disadvantage - you basically need to standardize first. However, it does illustrate an advantage of Federation too: any instance is free to experiment, if others get enthousiastic they can follow.

@arjen It's an interesting challenge.

Either we keep 'unmodified content federation' (I'm assuming that is the case now) and suffer some 'not-supported-here' issues, or we could somehow detect extension-support and federate different versions of the same content.

@mrb but... but... if I receive an HTML mail I would rather switch viewer than get an automatically transformed mail into text, because I would not see what the author intended me to see.

In the end, it is quite personal; I would prefer a world where nobody sends me HTML mail, but where I get toots with nicely rendered math formulas. Most people might have those preferences reversed :-).

In any case, the advantage of Markdown and LaTeX is that the unrendered version is so readable.

@arjen agreed, it's personal and I'm afraid the debate will never end ;-)

I think rendering is a function of the client; '...we give you the source, render it as you see fit...'

With a 'shared client', as mastodon-web is in my opinion, the line blurs a bit on who should decide on how to do the rendering.

@mrb true. Mime-types could be a solution perhaps, but a requirement would mean much more work for the client builders.