I can never remember how to write code into comments or titles. It literally changes from product to product and yet all of the products orchestrate together so that if you do happen to use Stash, JIRA, Wiki, etc all together, then you encounter as many different markup languages as there are Atlassian products.
It really is hellish.
I hope there's some good reason why they can't provide one "comment markup" language to all applications.
So far as I can tell, they did have one common markup syntax for all applications... but then Confluence users wanted a WYSIWYG mode, so Confluence now uses an XML-based format internally, and Stash is a Git tool and 90% of the Git ecosystem loves Markdown, so Stash had to use it too...
Markdown embraces HTML, and so a WYSIWYG mode based around HTML is compatible with Markdown.
Markdown's weaknesses for table design, image insertion, and complex layouts is all handled by HTML and WYSIWYG tools that edit that directly.
That would have solved the Git scenario, and the Confluence scenario, whilst having a single highly predictable markup across all of their platforms.
The problem really stems not from these problems being addressed per product as if they existed independently of all other products. But that's a terrible approach, as few people buy just Confluence without JIRA or Stash, people buy Atlassian because a consistent suite should work better than many myriad tools that don't quite know how to interop. Atlassian's strength is the consistent and integrated approach, so the UX should be focused on strengthening that.
I actually misread the URL as https://xkcd.com/927/ (having memorized that number like everyone else here, I'm sure) until I saw your comment. #277 is definitely not right.
#277 sure seems to me like a reasonable reply to "Whoever designed <such and such> deserves a special place in hell", which is what it was posted in response to.
Atlassian products tend to make me SO mad in this way. Confluence, can I just use markdown? No! Forget that I used it in so many other places. Oh but wait, someone may have built an importer... try to get that installed.
Confluence used to use markdown and wysiwyg, and about 5 years ago abandoned markdown to reduce development costs. They have a lot of non-developer users using Confluence, who aren't good with things like markdown. Our shop didn't like it, of course, since we were all capable of markdown and wysiwyg is never actually wysiwyg.
I could be wrong, but I think it used textile (I believe Confluence predates markdown). I'm not sure it matters a whole lot, but if you wanted markdown it's likely you would have felt underwhelmed with textile.
I fully agree that it's well past the time to switch to Markdown. That and the dropdown things are my main annoyances with JIRA.
It does make sense when you think about the context though - JIRA pre-dates Markdown by two years (according to Wikipedia) and Markdown has only got really popular in the last five years. Back when Jira's text formatting came in, everybody was doing their own thing...
