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Notes -
To be more specific, markdown is NOT a single unitary standard: there are different parsers that interpret and render the typed ASCII text in different ways, although in most practical use these differences are minor, it can come up. For example reddit uses its own version that almost no one else does. Although particularly with lists, you're correct here this is mostly an HTML problem at the end of the day, not a flavor difference. Actually because of that basically all pure markdown gets rendered this way. I think the notable exception is if you allow in-line CSS or something but I don't think that's the case here, since you can type some stuff direct in HTML but only a subset of stuff (I assume for security/QA reasons)
Pandoc markdown for example will auto-number the lists for you if you put #. before each, which is neat, but they are the only ones. There are other differences in list rendering between more common markdown renderers, though, and enough that advice has to be pretty specific to the forum (I dunno what TheMotte uses)
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