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Comment by marbletiles | Hacker News Reader

I've always found it strange that such a strong Mac advocate as Gruber was behind Markdown. After all, the Mac was doing real rich text in 1984, and with just one more push in the early browser days we might have got there for the web too.

Instead we're left with this inconsistent mess — hell, even Gruber gets his own link syntax wrong from time to time - because good enough was the enemy of better.

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Author here. I think, for one, Markdown's focus is on writing for the web, and there rich text wasn't good in 2004 (where copying/pasting from say Word into WordPress was always hit and miss, and rich web editors were far less advanced than the Webflow's of today), and was inspired by email where plain text stayed the standard longer than elsewhere (especially on Apple products, where into the late '90's the main Mac mail app and the NeXT email app that turned into today's Mail.app both were plain text editors for sending email).

It would be interesting, though, if Tim Berners-Lee's original dream of dream of the web being somewhere everyone edited had come true, then if better quality rich text editing for the web would have shown up sooner.

Yes Markdown was fundamentally a hack around the limitations of <textarea>, especially as used in CMS interfaces like Movable Type. In my alternate timeline, 90s Netscape would have added rich text support to those (likely submitting HTML, a subset of what Composer already supported) and saving everyone to come a startling amount of effort.

It does also play into the TBL vision like you say - it would have meant everyone was writing HTML (and with tool interfaces there to help non-technical people not have to care) rather than a small group writing HTML and everyone else using baby markup.

What do you consider “better” here: having to use the mouse to click on menus to make something italic? Or do I misunderstand.

Rich text editing doesn’t demand a mouse: it’s the same number of keystrokes to press cmd-b as it is to do shift-8. But if the intended output is rich text, then wysiwyg is a better interface for editing, yes. Not everything needs to degrade to a teletype.

But it’s more than just hitting cmd-b, isn’t it? Doesn’t the text that you want to be bold need to be selected first?

Not usually, no. But applying formatting on top of selection is another rich text benefit: with text selected cmd-B makes it bold, shift-8 just replaces the selection with an asterisk (in a standard text field)

cmd-B does nothing in a standard text field. If you mean text fields with code to handle keyboard shortcuts, you can just as easily have cmd-B surround text in asterisks as trigger wysiwyg bold formatting.

I am comparing basic rich text editing (eg the Mac of the 1980s) with the plain text areas and email composers that Markdown was designed for.

In rich text interfaces, keyboard shortcuts do more and work better than they do when typing Markdown in pure plain text environments.

That you can build better keyboard shortcuts for plain text areas is of course true, but it’s still a hack on top of a hack.

Markdown is plaintext, because of e-mail, which works best as plaintext. A plaintext format is much easier to write consistently, without issues like invisible formatting [0] (which will bite you when editing), or Microsoft Word’s decision to make your ordered-list markers bold because some part of the previous line or this line is bold (and I’m almost convinced the algorithm for that is closely linked to rand()).

[0]: https://xkcd.com/2109/

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