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Comment by johnmorrison | Hacker News Reader

It really depends on the specific user and why they need the language.

Ultimately, Polymath is meant to provide a file format that will work for the long term, so I don't think users should be always getting an abstraction of the language through WYSIWYG, because then they don't understand the files they are preserving.

If you only care about having a nice blog, then sure, WYSIWYG might be convenient, but the whole reason for using Polymath instead of pure HTML/CSS + JS libraries is because it gives you the same/similar level of convenience as a WYSIWYG editor without losing exactness and understanding.

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I follow that viewpoint and am OK with the direction being taken.

On the other hand, even after asking many, I have never received a good answer to why the exactness and understanding cannot be obtained with a WSYIWYG/M markup editor.

They abstract away from the underlying code.

You wouldn't be able to tell the difference between

  {b Bolded} {b text}

and

  b Bolded text

this becomes especially concerning with TeX, custom styling, etc

That makes sense, and I can imagine that.

However, should it not be possible for the software to find a minimal cover for the formatting that would produce the same visual output, thereby practically recovering what hard-crafted markup would have been?

Thanks.

Yeah, if I'm interpreting your words correctly, this would be like turning

  p {b This} {b text is} {b bolded} this isn't

into

  p {b This text is bolded} this isn't

But then the issue is as follows:

In Polymath, I'm planning on allowing basically arbitrary CSS styling by parent, id, class, etc. So if the user later wants to do something like put a rounded box around each span of bolded text, those two, while initially looking identical in WYSIWYG, end up completely different.

I can take that. Thanks.

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