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I don't get it. Markdown was supposed to liberate us from WYSIWYG and let us work in our text editors.

• billpatrianakos 15y ago
  No, I don't think it was supposed to free us from wysiwyg the way you mean. The real purpose of Markdown was creating a markup language that can be easily read and understood by humans and rendered like HTML. It's an HTML replacement for some use cases. When it's been parsed and rendered its easy to read and when you look at it as plain text it's still easy to read (not to mention write) even by people not familiar with code whatsoever. Imagine you build a simple website for someone and allow them to edit it. You could give them a WYSIWYG editor with formatting buttons but those editors usually override some of your styles and produce messy code. Or you can give them this Markdown WYSIWYG editor and in most cases it's easier to be sure it won't override your styles and keeps the focus on content. I love that idea. I've had lots of success with teaching very non-tech savvy people markdown in 5 minutes flat. And since most markdown converters I know produce very minimal clean HTML i can be sure my styles won't be overridden. Compare that to something like Wordpress' editor which produces all sorts of sloppy, obsolete code riddled with spans and stuff that overrides my CSS and this is awesome! So what I'm saying is that Markdown isn't just for text editors. It's for anything that requires the final product to be nicely formatted and the raw code to still he human readable. One of my current hobby projects is an online notes app that automatically converts your writing to Markdown if you use it and I love it. (https://writeapp.me https://writeapp.me - shameless plug for sure)