Show HN: I've built open-source, collaborative, WYSIWYG Markdown editor

Re:Show HN: I've built open-source, collaborative, WYSIWYG M... by wmeredith on Friday June 23, 2023 @10:57AM (#36447697)

"The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions."

Ha! I've never read that, but having used Markdown quite a bit, they have entirely failed that goal. A Markdown document is parsable by a human, but it still looks like content surrounded by tag barf that failed to render.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: I've built open-source, collaborative, WYSIWYG M... by Brendinooo on Friday June 23, 2023 @11:36AM (#36448341)

Depends on what you're doing. If your content is just headings, bold/italic, and links, I think it's eminently readable. Code snippets are obviously niche but are a solved problem.

People have mentioned tables here, and...yeah, they're messy, but I wonder how common of a use case that is for your average WYSIWYG editor user?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: I've built open-source, collaborative, WYSIWYG M... by psytrx on Friday June 23, 2023 @11:50AM (#36448554)

> I think it's eminently readable

This. And proper line breaks help a lot, too. There's a reason single line breaks are ignored.

> People have mentioned tables here, and...yeah, they're messy, ...

IIRC, the "original" markdown does not include tables. They've been added by GitHub (I think), because it made sense for them, and many parsers started to adopt. I agree they are not easily readable in "source mode". It helps to properly align stuff, though, but it's a PITA.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: I've built open-source, collaborative, WYSIWYG M... by Brendinooo on Friday June 23, 2023 @12:09PM (#36448836)

Yeah. A lot of stuff was added later. The original spec was pretty loose, which is why CommonMark became a thing.

See

https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...

and linked previous blog posts if you (or anyone else reading this) are interested in the history.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: I've built open-source, collaborative, WYSIWYG M... by hunter2_ on Friday June 23, 2023 @12:00PM (#36448691)

> proper line breaks help a lot, too. There's a reason single line breaks are ignored.

Documents that don't hard-wrap (they could opt to hard-wrap without consequence, to your point), when viewed somewhere that doesn't make it trivial to engage soft-wrap, are much more of an issue than the tag barf mentioned earlier, IMHO.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: I've built open-source, collaborative, WYSIWYG M... by nicbou on Friday June 23, 2023 @11:45AM (#36448463)

I edit a markdown-based website for a living. I'd say that it works really well, but a proper text editor theme makes a big difference.

I tweaked my Markdown theme to make headings bolder, links linkier, and blocks blockier. Sublime also collapses link URLs.

This keeps the text very readable, while letting me edit text with powerful tools. There's a table of contents plugin, but Cmd + R is a much faster navigation tool.

[ Parent | on HN ]