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bitcartel

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bitcartel
·14 jaar geleden·discuss
Found the info, interesting. Easy to think plain text is safe and forget about the parser.

http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00001777.html

http://blog.reddit.com/2009/09/we-had-some-bugs-and-it-hurt-...
bitcartel
·14 jaar geleden·discuss
As an end-user I find the Wordpress editor to be pretty good, and Google Docs ok. The Aloha editor looks great: http://aloha-editor.org/index.php

Pandoc looks great. So why not write in HTML or Docbook and then convert to plain text / RTF / PDF etc?
bitcartel
·14 jaar geleden·discuss
Sure, but why are we using the lowest common denominator, plain text, and then adding formatting?

Why don't we start with something like a visual HTML or DocBook editor, and then apply parsers to generate plain text, PDFs, etc?

Is it because we as programmers live in a plain text environment and are happy with the status quo, or is it because the tools aren't good enough?
bitcartel
·14 jaar geleden·discuss
If we assume WYSIWYG editors keep on improving, at some point, they'll become good enough. What then for Markdown?
bitcartel
·14 jaar geleden·discuss
Sure, but if we could paste HTML between editors and browsers without any rendering or layout issues, there would be no reason for users to look beneath the surface. I do agree that we're not quite there yet.
bitcartel
·14 jaar geleden·discuss
Why are people still interested in Markdown - what problem is it solving and for whom?

It's 2012 and we have HTML 5 compliant WYSIWYG text editors. We no longer have to write plain text littered with special codes, for the purpose of running through a parser, to produce HTML which looks nice on a web page. Maybe it made sense a decade ago when web forms had terrible editors, but not anymore. I think Joe Internet writing blog posts and forum replies would agree with me.

For developers, a README file in plain text looks great everywhere, and avoids any Github vs Bitbucket vs Assembla display issues. If you need to write structured documentation for a system, there's probably already a designated markup language you're supposed to use, so Markdown doesn't help there.