Werd I/O

Earlier today, I noted that I didn't get why people would use markdown to blog on their own sites.

That post was syndicated to the social networks I'm active on, and I got lots of very passionate replies across all of them. HTML is too heavy, and the existing rich text editors can't be trusted. #Markdown is easy to write, and its fidelity is easy to maintain when you send it: unlike a rich text editor, it isn't likely to break tags or be displayed wildly differently across systems. Finally, it's pretty close to the kind of hand-made markup you might add if you were writing a text file without knowing you were using a markup language.

Message received - and it was striking to realize how much people cared about it - but I respectfully have to disagree. All of those assumptions are based on the current state of software: you use markdown because you can't trust other editors to not break your stuff, and because most of the editors in use today have heavy, slow UIs that get in your way.

I think we can do better.

One pointer to the future, as Paul Squires pointed out to me, is Medium's editor, which is designed specifically to stay out of your way. I've written a few pieces on Medium, and have to agree: it's well-designed and just works. Of course, one of the reasons it just works is that it just runs on Medium. The portability use case isn't served here at all, either for transferring text content from place to place, or for using the editor on a bunch of different sites.

Nonetheless, I think there might be a future here, which is also pointed to by the likes of products like Aloha Editor. It seems reasonable that a configurable HTML editor could actually become part of the HTML spec. HTML5 does include the contentEditable attribute, which makes any content editable - but it unfortunately doesn't provide a way to submit that content as part of a form, meaning that these updates have to be sent via back-end JavaScript. It also doesn't provide style toolbars in the way that, for example, video tags can display player buttons using the controls attribute. It would be nice to see these things, so that users can begin to trust editors, and we don't have to use shims like Markdown when we don't need to.

In the future, hopefully we'll able to just write.

Markdown is useful: an easy-to-use notation system that allows you to mark up your text in a safe, fast way.

Because you're never letting your users write raw code, there aren't any worries about them posting malware or exploit attempts, or accidentally writing bad markup. At the same time, simple lines and dashes are converted to valid HTML. Everybody wins.

But when you're writing your own site, you don't need to worry about those things. You don't care about you posting malware or exploit attempts. (Either you want to, or you won't.) You also don't need to worry as much about bad markup - and if you're not proficient in HTML, you can install a WYSIWYG editor, like the one in WordPress. Unless you're a Dr Jeckyll who morphs into an id-like alter ego without warning, you don't need to worry about your own trustworthiness as a user of your own system.

On a self-hosted #indieweb site, all #markdown does is restrict what you can do. It has a syntax to learn, just like basic HTML does, and because you actually have to keep in mind which HTML tags it uses when you write it, it's actually a little bit more complicated to remember.

I like a lot of the goals of new publishing platforms like Ghost (I backed it on Kickstarter) but this feature sticks out like a sore thumb to me. I'm not at all sure this is the best writing experience on the web. And I don't see what's wrong with HTML.

Updated to add: I've had lots of feedback by people who point out that they just want to write text, not HTML, which is more than fair enough. But surely this shows demand for a smarter, context-sensitive rich text editor rather than another syntax to learn. Why couldn't an editor know to start creating bullet points when you type an asterisk and a space at the beginning of a new line?