[gpmcadam]

The problem which this is trying to solve is that clients like WYSIWYG and developers want control over their markup.

But, why not make a simple WYSIWYG -> Markdown editor? I've never found an elegant and mature editor which does this

[pothibo]

WYSIWYGs have its own set of problems and this is why most popular websites have WYSIWYG editor but do have Markdown.

Some issues:

  - Portability
  - Error prone (want to close a bold style but can't unless you copy/paste text)
  - Doesn't work well on mobile/tablet
  - Clutter the HTML as the rendering of WYSIWYG needs a lot of wrapper

[debaserab2]

Both Wordpress and Gmail have full blown wysiwyg, and many other sites such as facebook and Twitter have wysiwyg-like features in their messaging/commenting. What site bigger than these use markdown?

[calebegg]

What "wysiwyg-like" features do Twitter and Facebook have? I'm not aware of any.

[debaserab2]

User tagging. It's not a traditional WYSIWYG editor feature, but it means the implementation of the actual editor input field faces the same problems WYSIWYG editors do.

[hobarrera]

> facebook and Twitter have wysiwyg-like features

Yeah, you see plain text, and you get plain text. Big deal.

> What site bigger than these use markdown?

reddit, stackoverflow, discourse, all use MD. Granted, none of them are bigger than gmail (AFAIK), but they do add a pretty huge base.

[debaserab2]

> Yeah, you see plain text, and you get plain text. Big deal.

Nope, not quite. @Tagging someone will suggest and highlight users. Not a full blown WYSIWYG but in the same calibre of technical problems and reasons why people stay away from WYSIWYG.

[pothibo]

Wordpress WYSIWYG (TinyMCE) is notorious for bugs - I experienced them first hand - and it's not a website, it's a software people install. Big difference.

I had forgotten about Gmail, so I guess this is the exception to the rules. On the other hand, markdown is supported on Reddit, Stack Overflow, Github, and many more.

[debaserab2]

Stack Overflow and Github's primary audience is developers. Reddit's started out with a mostly developer audience and still today has a huge crossover. It absolutely makes sense to support mark down if your audience is developers.

I don't find gmail to be an exception to the rule at all - all the big webmail providers offer full WYSIWYG support.

[blumkvist]

>this is why no popular websites have WYSIWYG editor but do have Markdown.

huh?

[emp_]

While the opposite of your suggestion, the side by side editor -> preview (like Atom has) is so elegant to me.

[teleclimber]

Really? When I re-read in the preview window and spot a typo I naturally click in the preview window to set the caret there. But of course nothing happens. I have to map what I am seeing on the right to what is on the left, find the typo again, and then do the fix. To each their own but I find it to be awful UX.

[dredmorbius]

Smarts in the preview pane to reposition to the selected point in the edit file would be useful. Highlighting corresponding text -- e.g., highlight a passage on preview and have the editor scroll to the top of that section and highlight it.

[mynegation]

I was wondering about the solution to this very problem. I, personally, like the approach of markdown and live-updated rendered HTML side-by-side with toolbar buttons for markup, the approach that MarkdownPad[1] takes.

[1] http://markdownpad.com/

[bambax]

A few years ago I developed a rich text to markdown converter, completely client side in the browser: http://markitdown.medusis.com

It could be a first step to build what you're descibing.

[talles]

This.

I'm still waiting for an editor that let's swap editing between WYSIWYG and raw markup (for Markdown).

(I could try to do it myself, but I'm not much of a front-end guy).