[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