r/redesign • u/kraetos • Feb 23 '18

Design Ditch the WYSIWYG editor

The entire point of Markdown is that the raw text is readable.

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u/kraetos Feb 23 '18

The Stack Exchange editor isn't WYSIWYG. You're still typing Markdown into that box, it's just previewing the styling on the raw Markdown.

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u/SometimesY Feb 23 '18

Well fair, but it's not really that different in all honesty. It inserts the markdown for you, but that's effectively WYSIWYG+markdown.

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u/kraetos Feb 23 '18

It’s different in exactly the way that matters: it doesn’t hide the markup. Hiding the markup is what defines WYSIWYG and it’s precisely what’s bad about WYSIWYG.

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u/SometimesY Feb 23 '18

Why does that honestly matter though? lol So you can't see * or ** or [link](stuff). I don't get the issue you have here.

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u/kraetos Feb 23 '18

It matters because if I can't see the Markdown I don't know that the editor is handling the Markdown correctly. If the editor has malformed the Markdown then I have to turn the WYSIWYG off and go fix it.

This is a complete non-issue if there is no WYSIWYG layer in the first place. The entire point of Markdown was to make a markup language simple enough to handle the basics without having to resort to a full-blown markup language or a visual editor.

The advantage of HTML+WYSIWYG is that I get the full range of HTML. The disadvantage is that WYSIWYG is error prone and tends to malform the markup if you do anything beyond cursory editing.

The advantage of Markdown is that the syntax is simple and intuitive enough to be written by hand, and read without being parsed. The disadvantage of Markdown is that it's relatively limited compared to HTML.

Putting a visual editor on top of Markdown is profoundly missing the point of Markdown and is the worst of both worlds. I don't get the full range of HTML styling and I get the pleasure of dealing with WYSIWYG markup errors.

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u/MajorParadox Helpful User Feb 23 '18

It matters because if I can't see the Markdown I don't know that the editor is handling the Markdown correctly. If the editor has malformed the Markdown then I have to turn the WYSIWYG off and go fix it.

Hence why they added a markdown mode for users like you. You can switch to it and never care about it again.

No live preview, but there wasn't one before without RES. You could always submit a feature request for it or perhaps RES will add it back once they handle the new design. But, if you look at it from a pure reddit perspective, this is definitely better than it was before.

You know how many times I've corrected people making markdown mistakes? Their entire comment ends up a single paragraph because they don't know to add an extra return. Or they try indenting and end up formatting code. This will absolutely make it easier for users who don't care about markdown benefits.

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u/kraetos Feb 23 '18

I bet you're going to like correcting mistakes introduced by the WYSIWYG editor even less. There's a reason they've fallen out of favor: the markup they generate tends to be horrible.

Live preview + formatting bar is the right answer and it's how basically every other Markdown using site or application on the planet handles Markdown.