The Discussiontool Reply tool support some wikimarkup, but not all. Where can I find a list of supported wikimarkup? Which markups will not or never be supported?
Topic on Talk:Talk pages project
Are you more concerned about content already on the page (which will cause the Reply tool to disappear), or about content inserted via the Reply tool?
About what can and cannot be inserted in the text field via the Reply tool.
As a general rule:
- Things that fit on one line of wikitext will work – including bold/italic, links, and most HTML tags
- Things where the syntax requires line breaks will not work – including tables, parser tags like <gallery>, headings
- Also, despite requiring line breaks, lists will work
We haven't documented the details since it's difficult to document them clearly, these are very arbitrary limitations caused by the fact that comments on talk pages are written using list syntax. We could document that you can have a gallery with one image but not two, or that you can have a table only if the previous comment was indented without a bullet point (yes, this is really true), but you'd go crazy reading that documentation.
We have some ideas about introducing multi-line list item syntax to wikitext, which would allow all wikitext in comments, but we haven't had much time to work on it yet.
Let me think. The limitation is because wiki text doesn't have multi-line item syntax, so it is not a limitation caused by the reply-tool. Stated otherwise, if in source mode the syntax won't work when the first line starts with * or #, it won't work in the reply-tool. Or, if someone wants to input wiki text that has to start at the first position of a line, they can't use the reply tool. (And frankly, that wouldn't make sense to me to do either). This is an expectation and perception issue. People wrongly perceive the left border of the textfield of the reply tool as the start of a line in wiki source mode, which it isn't. Could there be away to overcome this perception issue and set expectation correctly? For example showing the :, * and # on the first line to the left and outside the textfield that are going to be inserted by the reply tool?
This is a possible solution however we are hesitant to clutter the interface this early on. We will soon have wikitext and visual modes, and the assumption is that the wikitext mode will be used by people who are familiar with the limitations of indented comments on talk pages. In the visual mode we are able to control which features are available to the user (e.g. we can hide the tool for inserting tables). Furthermore the live-preview allows users to experiment with what "works" at the moment. It may also be possible to provide a documentation link in addition to our current "feedback" link.
As Whatamidoing states below, our long term ideal solution is to be able to create a multi-line context in wikitext: T246960
But it might be nicer to make it actually work, instead of setting an expectation (for experienced editors) that it shouldn't work.
As @Ad Huikeshoven said the solution is to show the indentation markup, and to allow the user to change or delete it if necessary. That allows all markup, just like the Edit button does.
@Alsee, thanks for your suggestion. I didn't suggest to allow the user to change or delete the indentation markup. However, I am willing to support an opt-in only reply-tool variant which will show an unindented textfield for input prepolated with editable indentation markup. That would suit your needs. As long as that doesn't happen you can use source mode to add for example a table in a reply. You know how to do that. You don't need the reply tool for that.