[asddubs]

sure, but even if you want people to just be able to italicize or bold their input and nothing else, you're either stuck with the bludgeon that's contenteditable, or you can have fun reimplementing half of the countless nuances of font rendering on canvas. there really should be some sort of better option.

[catchclose8919]

...or add instructions to "have text between _underscores for italics_ and **double stars for bold** - just adopt a subset of markdown and be done with it - we need to stop catering to humanity's lowest common denominator.

[josephg]

Rich text isn't just bold and italics. It also (often) supports tables, embedded images, links, fonts + font sizes and colors. Markdown supports a poor subset of that stuff.

And its not just for "humanity's lowest common denominator". I love being able to copy+paste a table into an email and have it show up correctly. Today's convention where I have to screenshot something to show it to you is horrible.

Markdown isn't the right tool for every job. Would you use markdown to typeset your resume? To write an academic paper?

Lots of popular applications - like Notion or Google Docs - need something more powerful than markdown. And the current javascript APIs are failing them.

[zo1]

At some point you need more than what markdown gives you. I know, encountered it recently.

The formatting equivalent of... "640k ought to be enough for everybody".

[asddubs]

sure but that sucks, especially on mobile. doubly so if you try to do anything mildly more advanced like embed images.