[monsto]

his underlying point, and he as much as said it, is that bbcode IS successful because it WAS successful.

when it was born, it was convenient because it looked and acted like html while limiting the users ability fuck things up. at the same time it didn't go confusing the machine that was going to process it. it was clearly never designed for anything but bridging that gap... some 15+ years ago.

Flickr produces bbcode embeds, but imgur produces like 8 different embeds. existing adoption is not the sole mark of success for anything digital. facebook anyone?

the wysiwyg editors make it easier to generate "human usable code that limits fucking up". It matters because users can still fuck things up but for some reason they need to be able to read it.

THAT is why this type of thing should be used (on the developer level) as a replacement. It's easy to read, it's easy to grasp, it's consistent and it's no more difficult to parse (for erlang or haskell or php) at the server level than bbcode.