Markdown diff displays changes, but there are no changes

Question

Revision #2 for the answer in side-by-side markdown mode shows diff at the top and at the end of the post:

diff

The only change here is adding a status-planned tag (for some reason with backslashes) at the top. But there's no diff at the bottom. Why are the final lines highlighted as modified?

• Glorfindel: It's worse; if you try to edit the post and then preview, you'll see the formatting isn't working. I suspect Anita is using an alpha version of the site ...

Answer 1

There is a change at the bottom. Anita's edit removed a trailing blank line. It would be really nice if the diff displayed characters for white space (or had a mode where we could toggle it on and off).

Removing the extraneous backslashes from the tag should restore the formatting in the WYSIWYG editor.

It looks like the editor doesn't understand tags (there's a feature request to fix that) You have to switch to Markdown mode before entering them. If you type [tag:bug] in WYSIWYG mode it will escape the brackets presumably so that they don't get interpreted as Markdown, but then the tag gets rendered properly anyhow? I'm not sure what is going on there.

I enabled the new editor to test adding a tag, and inserting a tag in a post is really not intuitive.

diff typed in WYSIWYG mode (preview doesn't render the tag, but it renders in the post when I save the edit)
diff typed in Markdown mode (preview does render the tag)

• Glorfindel: You're right. The only way I know of to check this is to compare meta.stackexchange.com/posts/364143/edit/… with meta.stackexchange.com/posts/364143/edit/… ...
• ColleenV: @Glorfindel That's exactly what I did. My source code editors expose the "trim trailing white space" as an option and I suspected the WYSIWYG editor was probably doing it by default.
• ColleenV: OK, I've had enough alpha testing for now. I'm turning the new editor off. I really dislike having to toggle on a destructive preview to see what the Markdown I typed is doing.