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Comment by bbx | Hacker News Reader

  - Arbitrary written content with mixed in assets

  Nothing works here.

You're right. Offering a simple way for a non-technical user to manage (locally) his layout is the challenge of most WYSIWYG.

I don't use Medium but was quite impressed by this quick demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO8hysXMfvQ

Check out around 2:00 how images are inserted within the text. The interface works because it offers only 3-4 possibilities: zoomed in/normal size, full width/left float. Also, there are only 2 levels of heading.

This limited interface is a great compromise between a content-focused experience, and some layout flexibility.

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Yes, limiting the options is a great way to get good, consistent results. The problem crops up when that one user or client wants something different, then want to start making everything unique, then it's back to the same problem. Content management to me should be about editing the content with styling and layout done automatically, but in the real world I guess people want to be creative even when they are not designers.

The demo looks good but look how much fiddling he had to do to get the images the way he wanted them at certain points. There are so many little quirks that you can't really solve intuitively, you end up having to brute force a solution every time.

He even dealt with a number of non-image quirks and he probably coded the editor. Like when the paragraph and header were both bolded and he had to go back and fix it.

Medium is also highly targeted to blog posts too. A lot of non-technical users somehow want the ability to edit the content on the pages of their web site that might have fairly complicated markup/css to get the desired result.

You can solve the fiddling by replacing the whole UI with markdown. Oh, how will he push images to his liking then? Easy: {{image: cat2.jpg, left}} Ok. and howto make it fit the page and baseline without stretching out of the aspect ratio? {{image: cat2.jpg, fit}} Make a button for that like the Left,Centered,Right aligned text buttons and you're done. Even better remove the button and make the whole shit context sensitive, so that after dragging a picture you can do actions on it without having to mess with drag&drop. People don't get drag&drop, really, just trust me here. Most people aren't as aware as you about drag&drop and it doesn't always work too. Buttons help.

But yeah TinyMCE is DEAD.

Yeah I definitely agree with the drag/drop method not being popular for a lot of people. I'm not sure why, I guess it's because most people were brought up with "open the file dialog and pick the file".

If it were that simple there would be more good editors around. You should try to prototype what you're talking about and open source it, maybe it will gain traction if it's implemented well.

Thanks for the motivation, I'll have some more thought on that and try to implement it.

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