Why BBCode?
— Frank — Share
Why is BBCode used on (almost) all forums? It was initially some kind of safe form of HTML so the layout of the forum wouldn’t be disrupted and their wouldn’t be any danger of XSS attacks, but it is unreadable as hell in its unconverted form. It’s just HTML with square brackets instead of less- and greater-than brackets.
It surprises me that BBCode is still used on forum. There are other lightweight markup languages that are much nicer and are also readable in their unconverted form. So why not use Markdown, reStructuredText or Textile instead?
All of the markup languages I named have implementations in multiple languages (e.g. Python, PHP, .NET, Ruby, Perl). So let’s get rid of this ugly thing, called BBCode.