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Comment by OliverJAsh | Hacker News Reader

The behaviour you describe around italics is completely native to the browser, so it will at least be consistent across uses of `contentEditable`. I agree that it is annoying, but there were much bigger fish to fry (https://github.com/guardian/scribe/blob/87d3ed1a7f28d9fcdcc0...).

You make some very good points about Markdown, and we spent awhile thinking about whether to go down that road or not. Although there is a technical barrier to access for Markdown, that’s not the reason we decided against it. Maybe we should do another blog post to follow up with more details regarding our decisions. (Or, I’ll come here with more details in just a bit.)

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I have to reiterate...the product's relatively few shortcomings aren't yours, or even real shortcomings depending on use-case...I'm just bemoaning the lack of digital literacy overall of digital journalists, something I'm sure you have plenty of insight on in terms of your non-dev colleagues. And switching to Markdown not a change that the dev team can enforce on the newsroom...but it'd sure make people's lives easier in the long run, in my opinion...

So, assuming unlimited developer time, you would want Scribe to correct this?

I'm just trying to get a feel of Scribe's scope... Does it want to fix all inconsistencies, even pure UI irritants, or is it mostly about ensuring correct content?

I'm tempted to write a plugin that "types" space-delete after every CR. That's the quickest and nastiest fix I can think of...

Can you add an issue here (https://github.com/guardian/scribe/issues) and we can talk solutions? I have a few in mind!

Generally speaking, it should patch behaviour to the point where it doesn’t get in the way of the user and produces clean and semantic markup. We have found that patching some of the smaller behaviour obscurities would not be trivial. If it matters to the community though, we (the open source community) can definitely get them patched!

Would love to hear the reasons why you decided against markdown, it was something I was just discussing at the beginning of the week with my team (who work on news sites).

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