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I think in order to make HTML a friendly document standard it needs to be easy to type on mobile. At least in my experience it is quite painful typing HMTL tags

by grose 4y ago

I think in order to make HTML a friendly document standard it needs to be easy to type on mobile. At least in my experience it is quite painful typing HMTL tags (needing to dance between 3 keyboards). This could be implemented with a built-in WYSIWYG style editor on mobile (maybe piggy-back on the contentEditable stuff?). I would love it if there was a standard native rich text widget for HTML. On one of my sites (message board), I use Markdown but custom HTML tags for extensions like file attachments. You can allow these custom tags in your HTML sanitizer and replace them at render time with output from some template. So dragging and dropping a file would add <foo-file data-id="uuid-goes-here"> to your input box. Seems like a decent middle ground with common things easy to type with Markdown and special magic as HTML tags.

deltarholamda 4y ago
>it needs to be easy to type on mobile This is a great point. I've written a lot of stuff just using HTML, even doing the table formatting, by just opening up BBEdit and going to town. It's really easy once you learn the basics. There are (were?) a lot of secretaries who deeply loved WordPerfect because of the ability to open up the codes window so they could fix weird formatting errors. They're just a couple of steps from authoring directly in HTML if they so wanted. But it didn't occur to me that a non-trivial amount of stuff is composed on somebody's phone. A WYSIWYG editor on mobile is certainly doable, but screen real estate is precious on a phone. Markdown certainly helps with that.
xigoi 4y ago
QWERTY and similar keyboard layouts are not designed for phones. I recommend MessagEase: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.exideas.mekb https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.exideas.me... (Unfortunately it's proprietary and patented, but I haven't found anything better)

by grose 4y ago

deltarholamda 4y ago

>it needs to be easy to type on mobile This is a great point. I've written a lot of stuff just using HTML, even doing the table formatting, by just opening up BBEdit and going to town. It's really easy once you learn the basics. There are (were?) a lot of secretaries who deeply loved WordPerfect because of the ability to open up the codes window so they could fix weird formatting errors. They're just a couple of steps from authoring directly in HTML if they so wanted. But it didn't occur to me that a non-trivial amount of stuff is composed on somebody's phone. A WYSIWYG editor on mobile is certainly doable, but screen real estate is precious on a phone. Markdown certainly helps with that.

xigoi 4y ago

QWERTY and similar keyboard layouts are not designed for phones. I recommend MessagEase: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.exideas.mekb https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.exideas.me... (Unfortunately it's proprietary and patented, but I haven't found anything better)