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Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

Most static site generators require authors to learn something like Markdown in order to publish, which is a much bigger hurdle for non-technical people than technical people generally appreciate. Google Docs at least provides a WYSIWYG-ish interface many people will already be familiar with, and those that aren't won't find as forbidding.

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I definitely think static sites are a great alternative to WP, and I love Markdown. But you're right: trying to get non-developer users to write markdown was a struggle, they thought it was some new special language we were forcing down their throat.

I work for https://forestry.io/ and we created a CMS for static sites that lets users write markdown with a WYSIWYG editor, and allows devs to build an interface for editing front matter.

I never thought I would hear someone call markdown a hurdle to adoption. Maybe I'm more semantically minded, but I have yet to find a markup syntax easier to figure out than markdown, including the rich text editors in Google Docs.

There are much more intuitive markup languages than Markdown, like AsciiDoc and Org-Mode. Plus Markdown's issue with multiple incompatible implementations...

It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that non-technical people see these things completely differently than technical people do. Seen through the eyes of technical people like your average HN reader, Markdown is simple and lightweight. Seen through the eyes of a non-technical person, marking up text in any format (not just Markdown) looks indistinguishable from writing code, which is something they believe deep down is way over their heads. The pushback you will get from them if you try to force them to do it anyway is typically epic. They will fight against it every step of the way.

It's not impossible to get regular people to mark up text; WordPerfect did so very effectively for many years. But it's worth remembering that (1) that was in the 1980s, when people put up with having to learn things they didn't want to because the technology wasn't advanced enough to offer them an alternative, and (2) eventually the technology did advance, and Microsoft Word came along with its WYSIWYG interface and promptly put WordPerfect into a hole in the desert.

It's also not impossible to write a static CMS that provides a normie-friendly WYSIWYG interface, rather than having everything revolve around editing text files. That's what Movable Type (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_Type) was, for instance, a set of Perl scripts that provided a friendly WYSIWYG interface over content stored in a database, and then ground out static pages from that content whenever it changed. But modern SSGs are pitched to developers first and foremost, so they all revolve around stuff like Markdown and Git that are about as approachable to non-technical people as garlic is to Dracula.

This.

For my blog that I mentioned in my top comment, I use Google Docs because I'm working with people that usually don't know Markdown (I'm interviewing e-commerce business owners).

I need it to be as easy as possible for them to get the written interview done. From my experience, a Google doc is the easiest way to do this, and it allows for very familiar features when I ask them for edits or provide feedback in-document.

Basically, I'm trying to make as little friction as possible to getting the document complete.

This is just my experience.

There are free/libre simple markdown editors[0] available that have the buttons and keybindings more similar to Word. Additionally, collaborative editors like Etherpad[1] don't use markdown either (and btw, neither does WP, of course) and will be entirely familiar to non-technical people.

> Basically, I'm trying to make as little friction as possible to getting the document complete.

I can see how it may be more frictionless for you to use Google Docs, and how this may be less work for you than for example installing and running your own Etherpad. But I think it's too grand a statement to say that "You Don't Need Wordpress" because people that don't want to give up their online freedom still do.

Maybe that's what's upsetting people about this project, it's grandiose title that's dismissing another successful free blogging platform? While I fell kinda bad about defending anything PHP, WordPress does have a lot of extensions and your solution couldn't replace WooCommerce or WPForms.

[0]: https://simplemde.com [1]: https://etherpad.net

Normally I would agree but Markdown-esque text annotation has been a feature of many commonly used platforms for years now. A quick search plus my own knowledge tells me the following platforms support it: Facebook Messenger, Skype, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram and Reddit posts. It looks like LINE, Viber and Kik Messenger don't support it, but those are the only major ones that don't seem to.

Markdown is supported, but is it required? I know lots of Messenger and Skype users that have never heard of Markdown.

Perhaps an embarrassing case in point I have been a developer, sysadmin, infra architect, and generally in IT industry for couple of decades. I am not professional but dabble in HTML/CSS/JS. Certainly use social media.

And every now and then think to myself "I should check what this 'markdown' thing is" :P

Checking it now, I can absolutely agree that 100% of my non-developer friends will believe it is code and beyond them [both untrue as facts but true as perceptions]. And trying to persuade them otherwise will only convince them further how much out of touch with "the real world" I am :D

I don't mean they've heard of it, indeed what most of these platforms support isn't Markdown but a similar simplified ruleset. I mean that more people than one might think are using the general concepts of Markdown on a daily basis.

This is so true. The other day I listened to a project manager rant about how Slack is "like a coding tool" because "you need to put stars for bold". She was really quite upset about it.

Another time a friend of mine, who I wouldn't call non-technical, but isn't a programmer, was collaborating with me on a Github wiki for a project we were working on. I was flabbergasted at the way he would copy-paste and edit the source of pages I'd written just to get bold text instead of typing the asterisks himself. He was just really used to WYSIWYG formatting buttons.

This HN comment[1] provides quite an interesting theory about why Markdown in particular has such a different reception by programmers and non-programmers.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4765665

I hated WordPerfect for this reason at the time. I was a fan of Word for DOS long before Microsoft had the dominance it would come to have. And I say this as someone who did quite a bit of coding at the time (and used lots of different word processors).

https://cloudcannon.com/

For basic websites, Google Docs and its WYSIWYG interface is good for many people. Tools like Syncdocs https://www.syncdocs.com lets you create websites in Word and publish via Google Drive. In this market segment, people probably only want to publish simple websites, and the simplicity of Word/Docs is what they want, compared to Wordpress, which needs maintenance and has a learning curve.

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