[kstrauser]

For those who weren't there at the time:

Imagine that all web editors emitted a proprietary document format that wasn't documented anywhere except in the editor that wrote a file and the viewer that interpreted it. You lived with this because that's just the way it was done. It was common to get a web page into such a state that 2/3 of the page was red, one column was RTL for some reason, and everything was in italics except for the 1 word you wanted to be that way.

You were used to this. It wasn't great, but that's life.

And then someone released a web editor with a "reveal HTML" setting that suddenly showed you that `<font color="red">` tag that messed everything up and allowed you to delete it.

That's what Reveal Codes did for us. It was a revelation.

[ssl-3]

Yep. It's just like a right-click "View Page Source" function in a browser, except: A person can use it to perform modifications.

Everything in WordPerfect was just markup, and it was editable markup at that.

[MrVandemar]

When I first saw HTML I grasped it instantly, realising it was just WP "reveal codes" you could write.

Surprising really that there really isn't a word processor that basically uses HTML.

[kstrauser]

That might look a lot like Markdown.