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Comment by z3t4 | Hacker News Reader

I don't get these simplistic editors. You just have to learn ten HTML tags to do the formatting these editors offer.

What would be useful though, would be an editor that supported "design" and not just text.

Try to imagine yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn't know HTML and just wants to write a message or comment with a little emphasis and maybe a bulleted list. That's the majority of our customer base at Basecamp.

Creating an editor for that does sound like a simple task, doesn't it? Except the tools the browser gives you just don't work, as we've experienced first-hand over the years in the form of customer bug reports.

That's why we built Trix.

It may be used by people that don't even know what HTML is. Good luck teaching them what a tag is.

hahaha… oh god. This place is such an echo chamber…

Is "what would be useful is an editor that supports design" an echo chamber? Mightbe pretty hard to do right, but not an ordinary idea.

About rich text editors, since there are so many editors (even native) that lag on input I have just assumed that is something that only I care about.

Probably more the "You just have to learn a few HTML tags", which reminded me (since it was quoted in another discussion today) of the comment about Dropbox saying that it was trivial to replicate by getting FTP space, mounting it using some tool and running SVN on top.

EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10412530

Sharing files between NAT:ed computers is extremely hard compared to understanding simple XML.

That said, it's kinda sad we need "specialists" to make web content. Maybe we should abandon HTML for a binary format for WWW 2.0 like with HTTP!?

This isn't meant to replace something like say vim, or perhaps dream weaver. Instead, I believe this is for people who want to make it easy for casual users to format text in a comment or what not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com