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I couldn't agree less. Markdown is an abstraction that professional writers do not need. MacWrite et al solved the text-editing problem 30 years ago. Press the

I couldn't agree less. Markdown is an abstraction that professional writers do not need. MacWrite et al solved the text-editing problem 30 years ago. Press the "paragraph" button (carriage-return); you get a new para in the content and on the screen. Press the universal shortcut for italic (cmd-I) and you get italics, in the content and on the screen. And so on. Markdown is a hack that works around two inconvenient truths. First, in-browser editing has traditionally been shitty. Second, for those working in a coding milieu, you can't just type 'less someasciifile.txt' and have it display with the right italics, bold and breaks. If you're a professional writer for print, none of this has bothered you since WordStar. You write in your tool of choice (most places I've worked it's been Word, though I use TextEdit). You save. The designer brings it into Quark or, latterly, InDesign, which preserves the formatting. End of. You don't need to think of "markup language" at any stage in the process, and nor should you. Expecting the rest of the world to downgrade to a hack devised for the web is entirely backasswards. Scribe looks like a good attempt to bring in-browser editing up to the standard everyone else has enjoyed for 30 years, rather than dragging everyone down to the hack level of Markdown. Good luck to them. (My background: former full-time consumer magazine editor, now freelance; semi-pro coder.)

danso 13y ago
Sorry, but how did MacWrite solve the text-editing problem? I'm guessing you don't mean the actual dead program, unless it exists under another name. So what module could you be referring to? And is it part of Windows platforms? And how does your process handle the checking of URLs? I've done newspaper pasteup with PageMaker since high school...as far as I remember, there was not a simple way to double check URLs. Actually I don't even remember there being such a concept as embedding hyperlink URLs into what would be print newspapers, but that's besides the point... And correct me if I'm wrong, but where does the MacWrite magic turn into Web content? You ended your description at "designer brings it into Quark". That's not the Web. that's not even...anything. And of course, I'm talking about a lot more than the Web here, I'm talking about a portable format that can be read without any special text editor at all. How does MacWrite fit into that?
- Doctor_Fegg 13y ago
  I'm talking UI. MacWrite established a fast, efficient, clear UI for entering text, one that has been used by professional writers for the last 30 years. Getting that into your medium of choice, whether that be print, the web, or whatever, is a SMOP. The Guardian have chosen to tackle this SMOP. Markdown chose to hack around it instead, but at the cost of usability.

danso 13y ago

Sorry, but how did MacWrite solve the text-editing problem? I'm guessing you don't mean the actual dead program, unless it exists under another name. So what module could you be referring to? And is it part of Windows platforms? And how does your process handle the checking of URLs? I've done newspaper pasteup with PageMaker since high school...as far as I remember, there was not a simple way to double check URLs. Actually I don't even remember there being such a concept as embedding hyperlink URLs into what would be print newspapers, but that's besides the point... And correct me if I'm wrong, but where does the MacWrite magic turn into Web content? You ended your description at "designer brings it into Quark". That's not the Web. that's not even...anything. And of course, I'm talking about a lot more than the Web here, I'm talking about a portable format that can be read without any special text editor at all. How does MacWrite fit into that?

Doctor_Fegg 13y ago
I'm talking UI. MacWrite established a fast, efficient, clear UI for entering text, one that has been used by professional writers for the last 30 years. Getting that into your medium of choice, whether that be print, the web, or whatever, is a SMOP. The Guardian have chosen to tackle this SMOP. Markdown chose to hack around it instead, but at the cost of usability.