Stackoverflows WMD System - Where does my input become HTML?

Question

At what stage does my input in the textarea change from being this raw text, and become HTML? For example, say I indent 4 spaces

like this

Then the WMD Showdown.js will render it properly below this textarea I type in. But the text area still literally contains

    like this

So is PHP server side responsible for translating all the same things the showdown.js does to permanently be HTML in the SoF Database?

Answer 1

Well first of all StackOverflow is built on ASP.NET, but yes essentially the characters in the rich text box gets translated back and forth.