Where's the outrage?



  • @accalia said:

    Markdown was originally intended to be an extremely lightweight way of turning human readable text documents (mostly notes, letter, and extremely simple blog posts) into simple, presentable, HTML documents.

    Much like with Git, I don't give a shit what it was originally intended to do. I care now that I'm being subjected to it.

    Did you know Excel was originally designed to do, and only do, a computer representation of a (paper) financial spreadsheet? You know why it's one of the most popular pieces of software perhaps ever? Because Microsoft realized that what people were using it for was different than what it was originally designed for, and modified the product to suit its users.

    You know who didn't? Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro Pro. Guess where those products are now. Nothing but small Wikipedia pages linking to failed companies.

    @accalia said:

    For this purpose Markdown is far superior to BBCode

    But still worse than the fucking WYSIWYG interface that MacWrite had literally 30 years ago. LITERALLY 30 YEARS HAVE PASSED AND WE (the software industry) HAVE REGRESSED NOT PROGRESSED.

    If that doesn't make you angry, it should.

    You're responding as if you're not even AWARE that computers used to do better. It's like you're from some strange alternative universe where we switched directly from DOS and LaTeX to Markdown with NOTHING IN BETWEEN.

    @accalia said:

    Outside these two designed realms, both BBCode and Markdown suffer in the extreme, although Markdown suffers more so as it is underspecified (it was a very informal spec from the beginning), and now suffers from multiple implementations, many of which produce different results when fed the same input text.

    BOTH ARE SHITTY. It's 2016, why the FUCK am I manually marking-up text styles?

    Even fucking COMMUNITY SERVER got this right. The only reason you needed to mark-up text in it is because the WYSIWYG code was literally broken, due to not being updated (and browsers being updated daily). Which is another fucking problem of web apps, but that's a different rant altogether.

    You're comparing shit to shit and asking which one smells least like shit. Well, the answer is: both of them smell enough like shit that I don't want to experience the smell of either.

    @accalia said:

    so there you go, there's ONE situation where Markdown is better than BBCode, the one it was designed for. Outside of that? depends on how you're using it. the closer you are to the original intention the better you'll do.

    I just want to understand the thinking process (assuming any thinking was involved whatsoever, which I'm pretty sure it wasn't) behind a guy, in 2014 or 2015, saying, "hey, I want to create a brand new forum system using a text entry method that the average computer user in 1986 would have balked at."

    What the hell is going through these people's minds!? Why would anybody want to do that? And we're not living in a world where just one stupid person wants to do it, we're living in techno-dystopia where every team building forum software is doing it!!!

    What went fucking wrong here?

    Jesus.

    You don't see the automotive industry just one day decide, "eh. We did EFI for awhile. Let's go back to carburetors." You don't see the electronics industry going, "meh, HDMI and DisplayPort were good for a few years, let's go back to co-ax cables." Of course not, that would be insane. INSANE!

    And the worst part of all of this is it feels like I'm the only one who's actually speaking-out about this insanity. To commandeer a political joke that was stale when I was a baby, where's the outrage? Where is it?

    I don't understand how things got worse than 30 years ago, and how things are continuing to get worse every single year as those "old fashioned" applications (correctly built on 1986 assumptions that people want WYSIWYG) slowly disappear year over year.


  • FoxDev

    @blakeyrat said:

    I care that I'm being subjected to it.

    the door is just over there, you're welcome to use it if the forum offends you.

    as for the rest..... so?

    I can complain that there are better tools, or i can choose to use the tools that are in front of me. changing the tools isn't actually an option for me here.



  • @accalia said:

    I can complain that there are better tools, or i can choose to use the tools that are in front of me. changing the tools isn't actually an option for me here.

    You're missing the point utterly.

    The rant is: why do these tools even exist? They're worse than equivalent tools of 30 years ago. (I mean, at least BBCode can be used with a WYSIWYG interface, I'm not even sure that's possible with Markdown.)


  • FoxDev

    @blakeyrat said:

    The rant is: why do these tools even exist?

    Because they served a purpose for the original authors, and then others came along and liked them, or found them sufficient for their purposes and so used them instead of writing their own.

    simple.



  • Ok, someone OTHER than accalia respond, I don't know how to address this stupidity without getting mod warnings.



  • Here you presume that WYSIWYG editor is inherently better then hand written markup. Which I wouldn't agree in a general case.

    Oh you can yell at me, I don't mind.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    @accalia said:

    or found them sufficient for their purposes

    Eh, I see what he's ranting about too, a lot. Just look at the JS community re-inventing the wheel constantly, instead of learning from what other languages have done. Why are we taking something only halfway fitting, shrugging, and saying "close enough"? The open source community is supposed to be pushing the limits of innovation because they don't have stodgy corporate intertia, but....


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    Both WYSIWYG and hand-written markup have been around for decades. Why do we still use crappy WYSIWYG that makes you fall back to hand-written markup?


  • FoxDev

    @blakeyrat said:

    I don't know how to address this stupidity

    stupidity? it's stupidity to look at the origin of the code and understand why it was created? it's stupidity to understand the why of a tool, even if one does not agree that a tool is a good tool for the purpose it is being put to?

    It's stupidity to think that the GUI is not the end all and be all of programming, and that WYSINAWYG?

    if that's the case i'm not sure i really want to know what you consider smart.



  • That's a better question.

    My guess? Fucking MS Word.

    It has such a crappy editing UI. But at the same time, it's gigantic and powerful. An industry standard.

    People get used to it and don't expect better.

    Google docs made some improvements, but not enough imo.


  • FoxDev

    @Yamikuronue said:

    Just look at the JS community re-inventing the wheel constantly, instead of learning from what other languages have done.

    I certainly see that, and i'm no happier about it than you are, but at the same time i am capable of understanding why this is the case.

    @Yamikuronue said:

    The open source community is supposed to be pushing the limits of innovation because they don't have stodgy corporate intertia, but....
    yes, and you can find some nuggets of innovation there, but the sad reality is that without the structure of the corporate environment pushing for a product too many developers give into the temptation of NIH and IHBLRIA.

    And again i don't like it, and officially i don't condone it, but then i have found myself doing the same thing occasionally.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    And see like, if you standard WYSWYG editor worked like Word, I'd see it, but honestly... most of the ones I see on the web have like, bold, italics, maybe some underline if you're lucky, and bulleted lists.

    In Word, when I hit - and type some words and hit Enter, I get a bulleted list. That's a million times more useful than a toolbar button to generate one. Similarly, Ctrl-B is intuitive for bolding something. Why are keyboard shortcuts only just recently catching on at all on the web? The Discourse keyboard shortcuts for navigating up and down in the posts list (as if PgUp and PgDown didn't exist!) are damn stupid, and they fucked up the one that's actually useful.

    Being able to see the result as you type is essential. We've learned this. But we can't seem to figure out how to hide the markup and toggle it. Fucking Wordpress does this right. But it has a small fraction of the features of Word (can't even do headings).



  • I'm not sure I buy this whole idea that you must work directly on the final product (which is the basis of WYSIWYG). It makes it hard to add any sort of visual cue or indicator about the thing you're doing. Which leads to those infuriating moments in Word where your'e trying to "trick" one of those invisible markup elements to stick to a certain element.

    I think there's more to be done with twin-panel editor, where you're working in one pane, while looking at the finished product in the other. It just doesn't have to be actual markup you're working with. Or markdown.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    What about turning on the invisible symbols in Word?

    To type my previous post, I had to drop out of planning my sentence long enough to type '<' (which I have to glance down to find because I don't work with HTML as often as I used to), 'k', 'b', 'd', '>', then the keyboard shortcut, then close the tag. Something like ctrl-K, inserting a little symbol that looks like a keyboard symbol, then typing with the kbd tag markup showing as I type, then ctrl-K again to turn it off, would interrupt my train of thought a lot less. Glancing to the right and finding I fucked up a tag (which also happened in that post) and it didn't show up at all, making me double-back to fix it, is downright awkward.

    The problem with something like Markdown is, let's say you invent markup like '[Ctrl]' for Ctrl. But then I want to copy out a quote from a book, and I want to elide some sentences in the middle. So I type "A truth universally acknowledged [...] in want of a wife" and I get "A truth universally acknowledged ... in want of a wife" and now I have to figure out the escape syntax. Markup that's not part of the language being typed is better for that reason, but html is verbose and awkward to enter. Better to be generated.

    WordPress does well: it uses a WYSIWYG editor to enter the text, making the markup invisible, but if I need to correct something, I can switch to editing the raw to adjust where the tags are. So in an sense it's like your preview-pane suggestion mixed with WYSIWYG editing for simpler use cases. But they need to add fucking headings.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @cartman82 said:

    I'm not sure I buy this whole idea that you must work directly on the final product (which is the basis of WYSIWYG). It makes it hard to add any sort of visual cue or indicator about the thing you're doing. Which leads to those infuriating moments in Word where your'e trying to "trick" one of those invisible markup elements to stick to a certain element.

    I think there's more to be done with twin-panel editor, where you're working in one pane, while looking at the finished product in the other. It just doesn't have to be actual markup you're working with. Or markdown.

    ^ This. Totally agree.

    WYSIWYG editors and plain-text markup languages both have their disadvantages. What we'd really need is some kind of combination of the two: A WYSIWYG editor that also gives you insight into the generated markup (or at least the structure of the document), so you understand what it's doing and can correct its mistakes if you need to.

    @Yamikuronue said:

    WordPress does well: it uses a WYSIWYG editor to enter the text, making the markup invisible, but if I need to correct something, I can switch to editing the raw to adjust where the tags are. So in an sense it's like your preview-pane suggestion mixed with WYSIWYG editing for simpler use cases. But they need to add fucking headings.

    Yes, that's a start, but I'd rather see a visualization of the structure of the generated markup while I'm typing instead of having to switch to a different view which contains the raw markup.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    @asdf said:

    I'd rather see a visualization of the structure of the generated markup

    @Yamikuronue said:

    What about turning on the invisible symbols in Word?

    @Yamikuronue said:

    Something like ctrl-K, inserting a little symbol that looks like a keyboard symbol, then typing with the kbd tag markup showing as I type, then ctrl-K again to turn it off

    I'd like to see this idea explored more somewhere. I've literally never seen it on the web.


  • Banned

    @asdf said:

    WYSIWYG editors and plain-text markup languages both have their disadvantages.

    WYSIWYG has the disadvantage that usually it doesn't work. Plain-text has the disadvantage that it's completely useless if WYSIWYG works. Everything else is religion.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    @Gaska said:

    usually it doesn't work

    And why is it so fucking beyond us as a group to make WYSIWYG that works?


  • FoxDev

    @Yamikuronue said:

    And why is it so fucking beyond us as a group to make WYSIWYG that works?

    Put ten developers in a room and give them a problem to solve. Come back ten minutes later and there will be twenty different opinions in the group as to what the correct way to solve the problem is.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    This isn't even an opinion thing though. I'm not asking a bunch of markdown fanatics to make a WYSIWYG editor, I'm asking why the WYSIWYG fans don't have a good solid product to back?


  • FoxDev

    @Yamikuronue said:

    This isn't even an opinion thing though. I'm not asking a bunch of markdown fanatics to make a WYSIWYG editor, I'm asking why the WYSIWYG fans don't have a good solid product to back?

    i thought i was answering that, even among WYSIWYG fanatics when actually sitting down to design a good product to back there are a multitude of opinions as to what that product to be, so there will not be cohesion in the group to direct a solution, worse yet there's no money in the product because of all the other "What you See is Kinda What You Get" editors there's no strong business pressure to force cohesion in a corporate development environment.



  • @cartman82 said:

    Here you presume that WYSIWYG editor is inherently better then hand written markup.

    And what's stopping us from having BOTH? You know like Community Server, circa 2008?

    @cartman82 said:

    Which I wouldn't agree in a general case.

    You know, the funny thing is it's possible Markdown IS better. But that's not the kind of thing I'm going to take on faith. I need a quality study showing so before I'd get behind implementing it in... anything whatsoever.

    And so far, every developer I've seen who's a fan of Markdown has also been a fan of open source, a.k.a. we never bother doing usability studies on anything because fuck users.

    (With the one exception of Atlassian, but then again: they wrote a decent-quality WYSIWYG interface for their Markdown implementation. Gasp.)

    @Yamikuronue said:

    The open source community is supposed to be pushing the limits of innovation because they don't have stodgy corporate intertia, but....

    Did anybody EVER believe that bullshit?

    Since the first millisecond I was aware of open source, all I saw were blatant rip-offs of successful commercial software. Sometimes the rip-offs are generally better (take Open Broadcaster Software compared to XSplit Broadcaster) but that doesn't change the fact that the programs are 100% ripoffs.

    Hell, the first Linux distro I used was a machine running KDE themed to look IDENTICAL (and I mean almost TO THE PIXEL) to Windows 98. Even the theming was a ripoff.

    @accalia said:

    it's stupidity to look at the origin of the code and understand why it was created?

    Because it's all about the code, right? Who gives a shit about users. That's what software development is all about: wanking around with code only other software developers could possibly enjoy using.

    @accalia said:

    and that WYSINAWYG?

    Oh right. the technology isn't 100% perfect, THEREFORE WE SHOULDN'T EVEN BOTHER TO TRY.

    Ford exec: "hey we found a situation where our EFI system could stall the engine, it's kind of hard to reproduce on a real road but--" "That's it! Tear out EFI from every car! BACK TO CARBURETORS! We shouldn't have even tried to bother improving automobile design!"

    @cartman82 said:

    It has such a crappy editing UI.

    To whom?

    Have you ever met someone who was plopped in front of a Microsoft Word window (or Outlook, or anything that uses its UI) and couldn't figure out how to underline a word?

    Hey: let's do a little race. You underline a word in Markdown and I'll do it in Word, let's see who finishes faster.

    @cartman82 said:

    Google docs made some improvements, but not enough imo.

    I don't like Google Docs, but it's a million times better than typing Markdown.

    @accalia said:

    I certainly see that, and i'm no happier about it than you are, but at the same time i am capable of understanding why this is the case.

    Because CADT. Cascade of attention-deficit teenagers.

    These morons are building web forums, have they even bothered to LOOK at existing forums? We know Jeff had no clue what features Community Server had before starting his stupid project. How can you improve on X if you don't even know what X did well? Why would you even bother creating a new forum if you weren't trying to improve on existing ones? I can't understand the brain that thinks this way.

    @cartman82 said:

    I'm not sure I buy this whole idea that you must work directly on the final product (which is the basis of WYSIWYG).

    Then switch it into BBCode mode, like Community Server, and stop bitching.

    I'm not saying to REMOVE the raw markup mode.

    @cartman82 said:

    It makes it hard to add any sort of visual cue or indicator about the thing you're doing.

    What does that even mean?

    @cartman82 said:

    Which leads to those infuriating moments in Word where your'e trying to "trick" one of those invisible markup elements to stick to a certain element.

    ... what does that even mean? I guess there's a little weirdness around tables sometimes.

    @cartman82 said:

    I think there's more to be done with twin-panel editor, where you're working in one pane, while looking at the finished product in the other.

    What does "more to be done" imply? That it needs more work to be non-shitty? I'd actually agree with that, if that's what you mean.

    @asdf said:

    ^ This. Totally agree.

    I like when people agree with things I can't even parse. Haha. Agree with what?

    @asdf said:

    WYSIWYG editors and plain-text markup languages both have their disadvantages. What we'd really need is some kind of combination of the two: A WYSIWYG editor that also gives you insight into the generated markup (or at least the structure of the document), so you understand what it's doing and can correct its mistakes if you need to.

    Gee, it's almost as if some piece of software this community was intimately familiar with only a few years ago offered something like that... HMMMMMMMM!!! WHAT A MYSTERY!!!!!

    @asdf said:

    Yes, that's a start, but I'd rather see a visualization of the structure of the generated markup while I'm typing instead of having to switch to a different view which contains the raw markup.

    Like "show invisibles"? Except that only shows bits of the markup that are invisible (like which are spaces and which are tabs), it won't show you the text is about to turn bold because you can just use your Human Eyeball Mark I to see the bold text.

    @Gaska said:

    WYSIWYG has the disadvantage that usually it doesn't work.

    BULLSHIT.

    @Yamikuronue said:

    And why is it so fucking beyond us as a group to make WYSIWYG that works?

    I have like 47 applications ON MY COMPUTER RIGHT NOW WITH WORKING WYSIWYG. What is WRONG with you people?

    @accalia said:

    Put ten developers in a room and give them a problem to solve. Come back ten minutes later and there will be twenty different opinions in the group as to what the correct way to solve the problem is.

    Maybe they should do usability research and discover the best of the 20 that way.

    But that would involve talking to those scary people outside of the room. *Shudder*. Some of them are even ... old! Or poor!



  • @Yamikuronue said:

    This isn't even an opinion thing though. I'm not asking a bunch of markdown fanatics to make a WYSIWYG editor, I'm asking why the WYSIWYG fans don't have a good solid product to back?

    In this very thread, both Atlassian's Confluence editor and Google's Docs editor have been mentioned. Also WordPress. That's three.

    All three of them, while maybe not perfect, are a thousand times better than forcing me to learn and use Markdown.



  • BTW, text editing is not the only place IT is going backwards full-throttle. Look at IDEs for another example. Or, rather, don't look at them-- while in 1997 every somewhat-popular programming language had at least one quality IDE. Now? A lot, possibly the majority, have ZERO quality IDEs.

    And you have these weird situations where JavaScript has pretty good debugging tools, but only while running in the context of a web browser (and those are johnny-come-lately, before 2006 or so there was almost squat). But you run a server app in Node.JS and you got jack shit.

    Golang has something that calls a debugger, but it "works" by munging your code, add instrumentation calls between every statement. You know, like your profiler did back in the dark ages before tools got good at shit like this. And certainly no IDEs for Golang, the whole thought is ridiculous. It's not programming if it's not a black screen full of inscrutable monospaced text!


  • FoxDev

    @blakeyrat said:

    a thousand times better than forcing me to learn and use Markdown.

    you could just ignore the markdown. it won't kill you.

    /shrug

    While i understand your position i have no idea what you are attempting to gain by complaining about it constantly. it's not like yo can affect any change in the forum software, and it's certainly not like we're forcing you to use this software, unlike GIT which while i disagree with your position and complaints at least is a more understandable position to take.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    @blakeyrat said:

    Google's Docs

    Definitely the best I've seen, but there's no "show invisibles" mode where I can figure out why, when I delete a line break, it somehow loses half the formatting on the next line.

    @blakeyrat said:

    WordPress

    Cripplingly limited even for the use case of blogging. Fucking headers! Why is that even a thing that makes me switch modes!



  • @accalia said:

    While i understand your position i have no idea what you are attempting to gain by complaining about it constantly.

    you could just ignore my threads. it won't kill you.


  • FoxDev

    @blakeyrat said:

    you could just ignore my threads.

    you started this thread as a direct reply to one of my posts, and now you are telling me that you don't wnat to talk to me?

    :wtf:



  • I don't need or want ABSOLUTE PERFECTION. All I need is some evidence that SOMEONE in the modern software development community is interested in moving the art of software development forwards, and not backwards.

    Just throw me a fucking BONE!

    And look, I'm holding back here because of mod warnings, but JESUS. The entire concept "we shouldn't even try because the problem is difficult" infuriates me BEYOND BELIEF. And it should infuriate you, too.

    Of course it's difficult. Everything worthwhile is difficult. The easy stuff's already done.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    I definitely see your point and agree, if it helps. I'm feeling pretty beat down lately due to Yamirant crap, so maybe that wasn't clear.

    @blakeyrat said:

    The entire concept "we shouldn't even try because the problem is difficult" infuriates me BEYOND BELIEF. And it should infuriate you, too

    It should, yeah. Lately I want to hide under a rock until the difficult problems find someone else to bother, but give me a week or two to rebound and I'll be right there with you on that.


  • FoxDev

    @blakeyrat said:

    Just throw me a fucking BONE!

    Okay, Propose a project, with a sensible goal that will improve matters in this regard, and provide a mechanism that I can contribute to it, and i'll contribute towards the success of such a project.

    You're obviously passionat here, that's good. Now you just need to focus that passion towards crating a solution.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @blakeyrat said:

    Like "show invisibles"? Except that only shows bits of the markup that are invisible (like which are spaces and which are tabs), it won't show you the text is about to turn bold because you can just use your Human Eyeball Mark I to see the bold text.

    No, a bit more than "show invisibles". I want to know why a certain style applies to some element. Did I manually the style of some text? Am I using a template (like header level 1)? Did I maybe accidentally apply some extra styling to a block of text and didn't notice because my eyes are bad and it looks kinda correct? Happens to me all the time and I don't notice until I actually print the document.

    I want to have some view that shows me the document structure on the side which answers those questions, kinda like a dumbed-down F12 document inspector window.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Atlassian's Confluence

    One of the best WYSIWYG editors I know, but it still sometimes randomly (?) applies styles to the next list element that I only wanted to apply to the current list element Or randomly inserts newlines and I don't know why or how to remove them. That's exactly the kind of invisible structure @cartman82 was talking about, which should somehow be made visible so that I know what to do about it.


  • area_can

    I think it's because it's hard to make software that pleases everyone. 90% of the population is just fine with WYSIWYG, because all they do is make stuff bold and add colours.



  • @asdf said:

    I want to know why a certain style applies to some element.

    ?

    Put your cursor over it and look at the toolbar? You know, like... always?

    Unless you literally mean "why", then you can use the "Track Changes" feature in Word to add a comment every time you style something. I'm guessing that'd get pretty hairy pretty quickly. I'm also guessing that 99.9% of people don't expect the computer to be able to tell them why a human operating it did something.

    @asdf said:

    I want to have some view that shows me the document structure on the side which answers those questions, kinda like a dumbed-down F12 document inspector window.

    That could work if you assume one style per line. When you get fancy it might be pretty cluttered.

    @asdf said:

    One of the best WYSIWYG editors I know, but it still sometimes randomly (?) applies styles to the next list element that I only wanted to apply to the current list element and shit like that. Or randomly inserts newlines and I don't know why or how to remove them.

    See I'm pretty sure I've never seen that happen.

    I do have all kinds of issues with their Markdown formatter in JIRA bugs, though. Not the least of which is the Help button LIES about the format of some styles.

    @bb36e said:

    I think it's because it's hard to make software that pleases everyone. 90% of the population is just fine with WYSIWYG, because all they do is make stuff bold and add colours.

    Right; we've discussed this already.

    The problem is: that's no fucking excuse to just give up.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    @blakeyrat said:

    I'm pretty sure I've never seen that happen.

    Open a new Word document. Type some words. Press enter.
    Type '-', then space. Note that a new list begins.
    Type ctrl-B, then a word or two, then ctrl-B, then more words. That puts a bolded word followed by non-bold words. Press enter. Note that a new list item begins.
    Type words. Note they are bold.

    Sometimes it tries to help too much :/



  • @blakeyrat said:

    BTW, text editing is not the only place IT is going backwards full-throttle.

    Whoever is responsible for Eclipse needs to be beaten with a bag of bowling balls.


  • Banned

    @blakeyrat said:

    And what's stopping us from having BOTH?

    Why do you want both? What's the point of having plain text editor if you can do everything you want with WYSIWYG editor? And if you can't do everything in WYSIWYG, why it's even there?

    Also, having to support both WYSIWYG and plain text at the same time means that:

    1. WYSIWYG editor cannot expand beyond what plain text editor is capable of;
    2. plain text editor cannot expand beyond what WYSIWYG editor is capable of;
    3. people will complain if WYSIWYG editor generates ugly markup - if there weren't plain text editor, they wouldn't even know.

    @blakeyrat said:

    @Gaska said:
    WYSIWYG has the disadvantage that usually it doesn't work.

    BULLSHIT.

    Then pray tell, why plain text editors and markup/markdown/marksideways thingies are infinitely more prevalent around the internet than WYSIWYG editors? And why, if there's WYSIWYG editor available, there's almost always a fallback plain text editor?


  • Banned

    @blakeyrat said:

    And you have these weird situations where JavaScript exists.has pretty good debugging tools, but only while running in the context of a web browser (and those are johnny-come-lately, before 2006 or so there was almost squat). But you run a server app in Node.JS and you got jack shit.

    FTFY 🚎



  • So turn it off.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    Oh, thanks! That one's super annoying.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    Does Confluence have a setting like that as well? Because I'd love to turn that off.



  • @Gaska said:

    What's the point of having plain text editor if you can do everything you want with WYSIWYG editor?

    There wouldn't be one.

    But the WYSIWYG editor may not be 100% perfect. And also luddites are fucking everywhere and they'd bitch about not being able to manually type in tags.

    @Gaska said:

    3) people will complain if WYSIWYG editor generates ugly markup - if there weren't plain text editor, they wouldn't even know.

    I used to laugh when people would bitch about the markup Word would create when you did "Save as HTML". Who cares? It looks fine, that's the point! The HTML is implementation detail, not the end-product.

    @Gaska said:

    Then pray tell, why plain text editors and markup/markdown/marksideways thingies are infinitely more prevalent around the internet than WYSIWYG editors?

    First of all, adding "around the internet" is :moving_goal_post:

    Secondly, because they're all written by these idiot hipster-type devs who all think like Jeff Atwood. They don't bother checking if the thing they wanted to do has been done before, and better. They think "simple" is somehow equivalent to "usable" (which is why I think these people like Markdown so much-- it doesn't have a lot of different commands. It also can't hardly do anything).

    @Yamikuronue said:

    Oh, thanks! That one's super annoying.

    You know every time it auto-completes that it pops-up one of those little context "I just did a change" menu, and if you pull it down the link to turning off the setting is RIGHT THERE IN THE LITTLE CONTEXTUAL MENU. FYI. The developers of Word could not have made finding that control panel easier.



  • The main thing I want from an editor of either kind is for it not to screw with the contents of the post.

    If I post code with indentation, display the code with indentation. If I put three blank lines between paragraphs, display the post with three blank lines.

    Minecraft Forum and the Battle.net forums both use their own forum software that messes this up. At least Battle.net's BBCode-only editor was fairly consistent when I last used it, Minecraft Forum's hybrid WYSIWYG and BBCode editor will often completely screw up the formatting of your post if you use quotes and code blocks.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Yamikuronue said:

    Why are keyboard shortcuts only just recently catching on at all on the web?

    Because either browser developers or web developers, or both, aren't smart enough to use them! When Windows 3 came out--maybe before that--Microsoft went out of their way to make EVERYTHING functional without a mouse. Then they deprecated underlining keyboard accelerators.

    I use software every day that has me bouncing about between the keyboard and the mouse, instead of staying with one of those two as long as possible. It's not quite what Blakey was talking about, but it's insane that--as he said--we've regressed in the last 20 years.



  • @Choonster said:

    The main thing I want from an editor of either kind is for it not to screw with the contents of the post.

    You and me both.

    Here's a list of reasons why, numbering started at 3:

    1. Fuck
    2. Discourse
    3. Fucking with
    4. My list numbering!!!!!

  • FoxDev

    @blakeyrat said:

    Here's a list of reasons why, numbering started at 3:

    that one you can't blame on discourse, that's actually part of the markdown spec,

    like i said markdown was created by one person to turn their text notes into HTML that looked "okay", part of that spec was to renumber lists.

    it's bad, and stupid, and should be changed, but it is part of the spec so discourse would actually be more wrong to change that because that would be violating the spec.



  • @accalia said:

    that one you can't blame on discourse, that's actually part of the markdown spec,

    Now you're just lying.

    And in any case, if it's in the spec (which it's not), then the bug is the spec is wrong. ANY DEVELOPER WHO SUPPORTS SUCH FRANKLY INTUITIVE AND SURPRISING BEHAVIOR NEEDS TO BE KEPT FAR AWAY FROM SOFTWARE USERS.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    hipster-type devs

    Btw, even tumblr has WYSIWYG.

    Granted, I have no idea how good it is (and it doesn't seem to have an editing toolbar, :wtf:), but it's still a WYSIWYG editor.



  • @accalia said:

    spec

    The original one? Or CommonMark which most libraries supposedly support, yet Discourse's parser explicitly doesn't?


  • BINNED

    Can someone please explain this thread to me? I really don't understand. I read the whole thing, and it seems to me that some people think they have to manually type out markdown markup to post here - which they can, but there's a working (well, about as much as any other one) WYSIWYG editor as well.

    Is the problem that you can't underline a word by clicking a button? Because that should be a completely trivial addition, and I don't think having to occasionally type <u> </u> warrants the batshit insane tantrum in the OP.


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