All things broken with msee

[martinheidegger]

workshopper-adventure uses msee to render markdown. msee has accumulated quite a few bugs and problems. Some of these are very important for improvements of workshopper. Let me sum up the issues here a little:

• In order to somehow support the streaming API of workshopper/adventure, msee does offer a streaming API but the API just waits until all data arrived and then transforms the code. This is a problem because when we verify the users code we need to wait until the data is received. a real API could provide a better experience in that case.

• Tables are very limited which makes it a hard choice to use them. This is multiplied by the fact that markdown tables do not support multiline text and the go-to solution for this is html tags, which are also not supported.

• Ordered lists don't work. Deep lists don't work. Some block formatting, which is part of the list rendering, has bugs. For asian languages the line breaks can make it very hard to read. Which all cuts into the quality of the current workshopper output and by extent the fidelity of the exercise shown to the student.

• Colors have some bugs but on overall the "doesn't-show-some-colors"-problem is a problem that is more relevant than I would like it to be. Maybe we need some sort of "tutorial" that allows people test a few colors at the first run to see which scheme works?

• Syntax Highlighting is only supported for JSON & JavaScript but we write workshoppers for React, CSS, Bash, and what not and there is definitely code shown in those workshoppers and right now there is no formatting happening there.

• Links - one of the most important thing in documents - have severe problems. Like the duplicate rendering of regular links the resulting line break issues. Furthermore referenced links dont work. This is actively interrupting the reading flow of descriptions in our workshoppers.

• Images have been proposed as well but never found their way into msee.

msee is at the core of workshopper(-adventure). It might be better to completely re-write msee (which I am okay with) in a way that is less problematic or uses even a different formatting style. Such a package would need to support line-breaks and Japanese, deals with color syntaxes, and be streaming.