[teleclimber]

Am I the only one who feels like they were teleported back to the early 1990s upon seeing these text files with code intermingled everywhere?

I am not bashing markdown and friends, as I understand there is a use for these tools in some cases, but I am surprised they are so widely embraced and loved.

To me they just evoke the days of typing an essay on dad's 386 with Word Perfect 5.1 installed, and having to hit "reveal codes" to figure out what is going on. MS Word won against WP when they completely did away with these codes.[1]

Now it's 2014 and we're loving building tables by hand-crafting ASCII art.

Am I the only who thinks we can do better?

[1] http://www.theoligarch.com/microsoft_vs_apple_history.htm

[gkya]

Most the tools we have for WYSIWYG document creation lacks determinism and portability. For the latter, one could argue that there are open formats, but still, there should be a program that can interpret the format; whereas with plain text, such a need is void, as it is possible to view the document on any decent system. For the former, the argument might be that the modern word processors provide the facilities to deterministically lay out a document through the user interfaces they sport, but then because the formats they save are either are endemic to themselves or badly supported in other software* this feature is not of much use.

I can open a Markdown/ReST/Textile/... file with any text editor, including Notepad, Vim, Emacs etc., and also view it through more or less programs, or just cat them. I can pass them through head or tail; search them with common utilities and even edit them with some others. I am not bound to any programs in order to edit my program. If, on a computer I have to use, there is no Word, or Writer or Pages, I can still edit/read the document. I can read it online, via a browser. I can use programs that are decades old, and I also will be able to read the file decades later. When I send the file to someone else, I can be sure that they will be able to read it. Any usable operating system has a text editor bundled. This level of portability is just a dream for WYSIWYG editors. For these advantaged, I happily trade editing convenience off.

* Last summer, my cousins needed to use my computer for editing a docx document that was important for their undergraduate education. I was running Ubuntu OS at the time, so I told them to use the LibreOffice's word processor. The experience was bad; the document did not render properly, editing was problematic. This is the only case I can provide as an example to support my argument, as it has been multiple years since I used a word processor program.

[teleclimber]

I agree with what you said. I understand the advantages of markdown and why it is adopted (particularly in dev environments).

But you seem to agree with me that the markdown editing experience leaves a little to be desired ("...I happily trade editing convenience off").

What I don't get is why that editing experience doesn't annoy people more. There are tons of markdown-powered blogging platforms, editors, commenting forms coming out every day, but you almost never see projects that try to solve the original problem.

[gkya]

Desirability of the editing experience is a function of the kind of editing one does: I mostly write text-heavy stuff, blog posts, README's and similar stuff. For these stuff, I am quite happy with markdown, vim and the general workflow of mine around these tools; and I like that workflow. I do not need a piece of text to be red, or be centred, or wrapped around an image. Still, me and alike are the minority; normal people want these kinds of stuff.

For instance, I've deployed (!) a couple WordPress blogs and a PhpBB forum for a friend (yes, I'd touch none of these for my projects). When it was time to test-post in the forum, I started explaining him the markup for PhpBB. His reaction was this: "But in vBulletin, there is a text editor. I think I'll pay them $400 for that." He wants to centre the text, and emphasise phrases via colouring them red. Because he can. He is a normal person.

While I like my workflow, with markdown, vim, and a static site generator; I do not find markdown and alike useful for any major inscription, e.g. papers and books and alike. I'd rather use a suitable tool that takes away the burden of manually writing the markup, and allow me to focus on content for such work. iA Writer makes me horny, but unfortunately I do not own a Mac. I admit that I'd go nuts should I need to write a book in, say, LaTeX (or however it is spelled). Yet, the problem of portability of files is a superior problem than lack of convenience while editing. If I write my book with iA, and if it goes next year, what'll I do?

[teleclimber]

Thank-you for the thoughtful response.

Yes, clearly the markdown thing is natural for developers. After all devs spend all their time in cryptic text files that get transformed into something more useful and beautiful That's their (our) thing.

And since developers are the ones who create forum software, blogging platforms, one can only expect that their personal preferences would bleed over into these projects.

But it's unfortunate because in the meantime we're not really advancing the art of editing content, which is something the "normals" would appreciate. (And I think even a number of developer-types would appreciate writing content without markdown if you gave them something that actually worked and worked with static site generators.)

Regarding IA, I don't have it but it says that it saves files as plain text?

[bowerbird]

let me try again.

if you have _specifics_ on "the art of editing content", and the interface you want, i would like to hear them...

-bowerbird

[bowerbird]

my intention is to solve the problems, all of them.

so i would appreciate a thoughtful write-up of them. i know many of them, probably most. but i'm curious.

my target is writers, not programmers, but my intent is to create the best possible tool for those writers. not just a "suitable" tool -- the _best_one_possible_.

-bowerbird

[osivertsson]

The big gain is that is all just text and can be handled very well by the same version control system as the code is.

I can easily glance at what has happened to the docs just by looking at a diff, much like I do with all code my team produces already.

And being represented by all text doesn't mean this is what you give your customers. With a bit of work with pandoc etc. you can get a really slick and impressive end result.