[thanatropism]

It'd be interesting to learn more about what exactly these non-tech editors (that are somehow writing for the web on computing machines) find difficult about Markdown.

Markdown was designed to be really, really, really easy to write. But it was designed by techies based on their own experience mostly. Maybe there's a better, simpler MarkPopular that can be used by a wider user base.

[always_good]

Two things that tripped up my users (and sometimes me) and made a live-preview essential were:

- Links and images. ![]() and []() are something you'll see people consistently reverse.

- Nesting markdown in a list, like images and codeblocks. And forgetting that two newlines will end the list which can create an unobvious result in the live preview.

Markdown is easy to write (unlike BBCode) but not always simple to remember, format, or reason about with its strict whitespace rules (unlike BBCode).

[repsilat]

> []() are something you'll see people consistently reverse.

Yeah, I've seen this. To help people remember (not ideal, but useful) is the phrase "Robot brackets for human text, human brackets for robot text."

No idea why it helps, you'd expect the reverse to be equally memorable, but it seems to stick with people.

[always_good]

Heh, and then one still accidentally writes !()[] or ()[].

The other nuisance for my users was that the [] text is optional (and relatively worthless from user POV) in ![]() but not []().

I wonder if `!<url>` for images would've been nice alongside `<url>`.

Reddit + the Reddit Enhancement Suite browse plugin have a decent middleground where all urls are autolinked but image urls have additional expand/collapse UI.

[kqr]

> the other nuisance for my users was that the [] text is optional (and relatively worthless from user POV) in ![]() but not []().

Is it not converted to an alt attribute in the rendered HTML?

[thanatropism]

So wait. You're saying maybe a more explicit language would be easier to use?

It makes sense. When I was just a kid and computers ran MS-DOS my dad did extensive amounts of work with a text editor that used SGML-like takes in angle brackets (but was like <bi> for begin italic, <ei> for end italic; I don't remember actual details). He was past 35, a classical musician and never a techie before (although obviously he wrote on typewriters before), but he basically learned it after less than half an hour of instructions with the guy who brought and installed the machine. Probably less than 10 minutes.

Maybe we're attracted to Markdown/YAML/Org, etc. out of a love of simplicity that's more due to aesthetics than practicality.

[macintux]

I agree strongly with your pain points.

The other problem a live preview helps with: the inconsistencies between various Markdown implementations/flavors.