Markdown is an abstraction that professional writers do not need. MacWrite et al solved the text-editing problem 30 years ago. Press the "paragraph" button (carriage-return); you get a new para in the content and on the screen. Press the universal shortcut for italic (cmd-I) and you get italics, in the content and on the screen. And so on.
Markdown is a hack that works around two inconvenient truths. First, in-browser editing has traditionally been shitty. Second, for those working in a coding milieu, you can't just type 'less someasciifile.txt' and have it display with the right italics, bold and breaks.
If you're a professional writer for print, none of this has bothered you since WordStar. You write in your tool of choice (most places I've worked it's been Word, though I use TextEdit). You save. The designer brings it into Quark or, latterly, InDesign, which preserves the formatting. End of. You don't need to think of "markup language" at any stage in the process, and nor should you.
Expecting the rest of the world to downgrade to a hack devised for the web is entirely backasswards. Scribe looks like a good attempt to bring in-browser editing up to the standard everyone else has enjoyed for 30 years, rather than dragging everyone down to the hack level of Markdown. Good luck to them.
(My background: former full-time consumer magazine editor, now freelance; semi-pro coder.)
And how does your process handle the checking of URLs? I've done newspaper pasteup with PageMaker since high school...as far as I remember, there was not a simple way to double check URLs. Actually I don't even remember there being such a concept as embedding hyperlink URLs into what would be print newspapers, but that's besides the point...
And correct me if I'm wrong, but where does the MacWrite magic turn into Web content? You ended your description at "designer brings it into Quark". That's not the Web. that's not even...anything.
And of course, I'm talking about a lot more than the Web here, I'm talking about a portable format that can be read without any special text editor at all. How does MacWrite fit into that?
Getting that into your medium of choice, whether that be print, the web, or whatever, is a SMOP. The Guardian have chosen to tackle this SMOP. Markdown chose to hack around it instead, but at the cost of usability.
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.)
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...
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!
Django was originally developed by a Kansas newspaper.
http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/
That said, I think those are exceptions, not the rule.
Tables are a problem, but tables are just as horrible to write in Markdown as they are in HTML.
As far as I know, the solution they have here is impressive and as good as the state-of-the-art, in terms of usability and modularity...but it still can't overcome the major quirks that come up with rich-text editors.
For example, I typed in the following in the demo (http://guardian.github.io/scribe/):
Hello, world
Why italics?
So the error here is that after typing "world", I switched off the italics and hit line break/Enter. However, the italics-mode persisted into the next line. This was the generated HTML:
As a programmer, I can appreciate why this might happen, and I know how to fix it...but this is the kind of unexpected behavior that is the bane of the layperson, so much so that with each new rich-text environment -- whether it be Word, Google Docs, TinyMCE, etc -- they have to come up with a whole new list of hacks to get around these quirks.edit: the rest of this is address to a general "you", not to "you, the Guardian developers", as in, "why didn't you just do Markdown"...though if the Guardian took the lead in that, I'd most definitely upvote that too ;)
I think rich-text editors are fine for the very layperson. But I think for professional reporters, there needs to be a move toward the expectation that they all learn Markdown. Note, I'm not saying that everyone needs to learn HTML...but Markdown is basically the exact subset of text formatting a professional online writer needs to communicate 99.9% of their reportage material, with the rest being made up through plugins/shortcode/embed, as is currently the case for most online CMSes.
Markdown can be written in any editor and is portable to a huge variety of systems and services. More importantly, even without a specialized editor, Markdown still has human-friendly structure. What else does a writer need?
Before you say: oh but we can't expect our writers to learn code-like things...this is not true at all. As an intern at the Denver Post, I spent at least a day learning the in-house editor, which was Windows-only, designed for the print-publishing workflow, and had all manner of arcane key combinations to add editing marks (again, for print, and not the web). Everyone was expected to learn it, and everyone did fine.
But unlike Markdown, this in-house closed source coding system was...well, shitty as most industry-specific codes are...and once in awhile someone would accidentally "un-hide" notes meant for an editor's eyes only, which would then show up in print. What I love about Markdown is that you don't even have to really know it to write what you need...hitting Enter creates a paragraph break, both in your text editor and the platform to which you publish. How much easier can you get?