Markdown in room topics should be parsed and displayed properly

[kittykat]

Steps to reproduce

1. Go to a room which has markdown used in a topic (e.g. [foo](example.com))
2. Open room detail view from the top bar

Outcome

What did you expect?

Topic is displayed correctly, like on web

What happened instead?

I see the actual markdown which hasn't been parsed

[kittykat]

@VolkerJunginger What are your thoughts on this issue? Should it be a blocker for closing the room detail page story?

[jmartinesp]

Just a note:

Topic is displayed correctly, like on web

I believe this happens only if you have enabled the "Show HTML representation of room topics" labs flag.

However, it seems URL links get autodetected and are clickable even without the MD conversion. Would that be enough?

[nadonomy]

Suggestion - even if we don't implement markdown parsing yet - could be worth converting to plaintext so we don't expose ugly markdown syntax.

[jmartinesp]

Suggestion - even if we don't implement markdown parsing yet - could be worth converting to plaintext so we don't expose ugly markdown syntax.

Actually, that's probably even harder to achieve 😅 . We'd need to use a markdown parser and then remove anything that's not plain text, which is slightly more work than just using a markdown parser and transforming it to HTML.

[bmarty]

Can the conversion of the room topic from markdown to Html be handled by the SDK, either by providing the Html version directly, or by exposing a function to do the conversion? CC @Hywan

[Hywan]

That's doable. ruma is already doing it for the case of events (m.text). We should find a way to expose the Markdown parser used by ruma, but clearly doable.

[jplatte]

I thought it was mentioned here before, but doesn't seem so: The only way to put HTML into the topic is MSC3765, so we need to add support for that to Ruma first. Just an an implementation hint, @Hywan :)

[Hywan]

Good to know, thanks!

For the moment, we will receive room names from Sliding Sync. I wonder how all that fits within Ruma 🤔.

[jplatte]

I don't think the two are related, really (room name and room topic)?

[Hywan]

Yeah, I just got confused. Taking a look now at adding MSC3765 inside Ruma.

[Hywan]

The MSC isn't stable, and the implementation inside Element Web doesn't seem to match the MSC. I don't think any of this is ready to be implemented. I think it needs more preparations.

[bmarty]

Let try to us the Rich Text Editor library to render the topic.