

Ask HN: Will Markdown Ever Go Mainstream? - deconq

I seriously can't imagine Markdown ever getting any mainstream popularity.<p>I would expect that most everyday Internet users, if they were asked to try out both Markdown and a WYSIWYG editor, would prefer the WYSIWYG hands down.<p>Even being a coder myself, I tried to get into Markdown to write articles for my WordPress site, but ended up returning to the visual TinyMCE editor. I just found it more convenient.<p>Markdown's popularity is due to 'geek appeal', not ease of use. The masses won't appreciate it the way coders do.
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coldtea
> _Markdown's popularity is due to 'geek appeal', not ease of use. The masses
> won't appreciate it the way coders do._

It's still about "ease of use", but for a particular subgroup: coders and
power-users.

In another example, the casual user would prefer "search and replace" Word-
style too, including lots of manual fiddling with the replacing, whereas a
coder would opt to use regular expressions. That's not because regexes have
some "geek appeal", that's merely using what (given your skill level) fits the
job better.

It was never meant to be "mainstream" in the general way.

That said, you trying it and reverting to TinyMCE could be explained in
various ways:

\-- Maybe not a UNIX-style coder? Are you familiar with the command line, the
UNIX way, etc?

\-- Wordpress is not particularly suited for Markdown. It's a third-party
option in Wordpress, whereas other systems (e.g GitHub or even Tumblr) have it
as a built-in option.

\-- What exactly do you find "more convenient" in TinyMCE? Blog articles are
generally long stretches of text, for which Markdown is as natural as it gets.
So, what exactly does TinyMCE offers you? Do you really want to see hacky,
kludgy bulletpoints for your lists, as mimicked by TinyMCE (and, so easily
broken)? Do you use tables and colors in your post text (resulting in equally
fragile markup)? Or is pressing "B" so much better than " __" for bold text?

I'm not generally against WYSIWYG, but it would have to be a no-BS, perfect
editor, and no HTML editor fills that role. The markup is bad, and while you
don't have to look at it, it is also fragile. Nesting things 1-2 levels (a
list, a table, etc), deleting rows, moving images, end with various kind of
broken result.

IIRC, the Google Docs team took a completely different approach to the normal
HTML WYSIWYG widget (creating it from scratch with primitives much alike a
desktop WYSIWYG app). That's probably the only one that's tolerable.

