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Comment by edtechdev | Hacker News Reader

This would be very popular indeed if a WYSIWYG editor was used instead of a markup language.

There has been study after study showing how the wiki markup syntax is a hurdle to participation on wikipedia, to the point where wikipedia is now finally, after 12 years, working on a wysiwyg editor: http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/21/jimmy-wales-on-new-editing-...

There are so many free and open source wysiwyg editors that can be easily plugged into a site: aloha, tinymce, ckeditor, etc.

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But it's Markdown instead of MediaWiki syntax. Markdown's got a lot of momentum right now, and for good reason.

We really need to get people out of the habit of using WYSIWYG editors.

At some point around 2005 there were talks on the web about [WYSIWYM][1] editor. It hasn't widely taken off yet. Or maybe markdown simply meets those needs.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYM

Just stick them on reddit and they will learn markdown in a few weeks!

This is a very naive view of reality. WYSIWYG editors are superior in almost every way for almost all users. I used to force markdown on people too, but WYSIWYG is really a killer feature for most users. It requires far less learning, the features are more discoverable, it's quicker to edit even after they manage to become proficient with markdown, and there is no mental translation from what they're editing to what it's going to look like. But also other features that you might not immediately think of are very important, such as the ability to copy-paste from their existing word processor documents and preserve markup. Editing rich text with a plain text editor rather than a rich text editor is to most people like editing your photos with a hex editor instead of Photoshop is to you: not the right tool for the job, unpleasant, slow, requires learning, requires mental translation, and can't easily copy paste from existing material.

It is comparable to the difference between digital cameras and film cameras. I see results sooner.

Sure, I can take good film pictures if I know the lighting conditions, shutter settings, business about f-stops but being able to see how you failed sooner is a big plus.

Why? Garish formatting?

A really simple editor that only had the formatting options allowed by markdown would be functionally equivalent, and the great unwashed would find it much easier to use.

My primary reason is version control. It's much easier to diff text files.

Wikipedia has been working on a WYSIWYG editor for as long as I can remember, it's just that creating one for a markup syntax as convoluted as MediaWiki's (with templates, Turing-complete parser logic etc) has been near-impossible until recently.

I like how Tumblr does it. Tumblr defaults to a WYSIWYG editor, but you can switch it to accept Markdown if you prefer. (The API also accepts Markdown or sanitized HTML)

I agree - the purpose of this product is to check if the overall concept is needed. And if so, I will invest in making it a WYSIWYG editor.

And none of them work on mobile.

I just found Redactor [1] that works fine on Android 4.0, so I redact my comment.

[1] http://imperavi.com/redactor/

Works on IOS, too. Quite a nice piece of code.

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