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Ahh, yes. I, as a developer, think Markdown is wonderful – simple even – so I use it all the time. It finds it's way into my applications and interfaces. The pu
by iambateman 2y ago
Ahh, yes. I, as a developer, think Markdown is wonderful – simple even – so I use it all the time. It finds it's way into my applications and interfaces. The pure elegance is the stuff of dreams.
Then I bring a client into their app for an onboarding meeting. When they see a bit of Markdown, they start to fidget, then sweat. "Will I be asked to perform these magic incantations?" they wonder. They feel a bit of queasiness but try to hold it back. Perhaps this will be ok. But, after about 10 minutes, I show them that `# Header` is how you make a header.
Their disdain is now total...How dare I imply that a hashtag implies a header. This is hard.
Then, I show them a link. "It's just like this", I say: `(https://example.com)[example https://example.com)[example link]`. "You'll get used to it."
Finally, the client pounds his fists on the table. "That's CODING DAMMIT. WE PAID YOU TO DO THE CODING YOU *$$HOLE. I want it to be like...well...Microsoft Word."
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You see, my friends...the real problem here is that Microsoft Word is a nightmare but it is _the_ nightmare to which all other dreams are compared. And thus, sheepishly, I awaken, and install TinyMCE.
- haroldp 2y agoAnd now you have a new job: untangling garbage <a><em><em style="font-weight: bold;"><em><span>HTML </em></span></a></em></em> disasters and coaching your clients about keeping the text styles in alignment with the site branding. :)
- iambateman 2y ago“Coaching clients to keep text styles aligned with the brand” should come with a trigger warning! :D
- haroldp 2y agoIt never does. It just LEAPS out at you on a Tuesday morning, stabbing at your eyes with pink, serif, all-caps. How about, "Coaching clients to ask for new DB fields instead of overloading existing ones?"
- kragen 2y agothis sounds like fiction you wrote about stereotypes rather than honest reporting of your experiences—and not only because you got the markdown link syntax backwards
- iambateman 2y agoI enjoyed the dramatic value, for sure. But I did have a client who really hated markdown because she couldn’t make colors red.
- kragen 2y agothat's a legit problem with markdown, yeah. you can use a <span> or something but you can't use a <p> or <div> because everything inside it is exempted from markdown parsing, and the ux is abysmal compared to a wysiwyg editor with a color picker, and there's no extension mechanism to hang stuff like that on in a backward-combatible manner. commonmark is a little bit better there
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]