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Comment by pmlnr | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone aware of a word processor, text editor, whatever, that can handle HTML definition lists natively?

I'd really like a WYSIWYG editor that's designed to produce HTML documents. Not for web pages, but for documents. HTML has great prose features, but it seems like there's nothing in between Microsoft Word and "now you're building a website".

I guess one of the many Markdown editors is what you're looking for, then you just need to add a build step at the end. Unless you need any of the 'document' features of html that aren't in md, of course.

I agree some of the WYSIWYG markdown editors are the closest thing to what I want. I quite like Obsidian's editor for what it is, which does a pretty good job balancing rendering and letting you edit the actual markdown syntax.

But you're editing markdown, not HTML. And, for example, markdown doesn't have definition lists.

None of the visual markdown editors - the ones that render the text, eg. Typora - seem to support definition lists.

I don't think so. They were pretty specific: "I'd really like a WYSIWYG editor".

There are definitely Markdown editors that are WYSIWYG. In fact, md is a lot 'closer' to WYSIWYG than HTML is.

I think HTML is a pretty decent semantic structure for documents. The WYSIWYG is good for convenience, as is markdown text format.

Probably prosemirror. I don't know that it's built in by default, but it's well within prosemirror's model, so it shouldn't require a large investment to use.

That said, prosemirror's got a pretty steep learning curve.

Nothing is built into ProseMirror except for the text span.

For a definition list, you’d probably want two node types: a definition list, and a definition list item.

And then create toDOM and parseDOM methods to render and parse respectively the html you want.

Isn't the "flat markup" for inline elements in prosemirror kind of unnatural to work on html?

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