In my web shop, our first CMS (circa 2003) utilized a WYSIWYG editor which was a disaster. For all of the supposed benefits it brought to the editing / writing

In my web shop, our first CMS (circa 2003) utilized a WYSIWYG editor which was a disaster. For all of the supposed benefits it brought to the editing / writing process for our clients, the reality is that upon hitting 'save', the style/formatting issues on the front-end were awful, having picked up junk from MS Word, or copied web pages, or massive embedded images, you name it. It threw our shop into perpetual customer-support mode as our clients struggled to get anything to look right, or consistent. For our 2nd client CMS, we chucked the WYSIWYG, spent a little more time helping our clients understand Markdown (actually Textile - this took a few minutes of our and their time). There was a little squirming involved on the part of our clients, but after a day or so, they understood it. Best part, it just works. It ensures that our site renders perfect, semantically correct HTML! WYSIWYG in RTEs has grown up a bit, as we can see in Guardian's latest attempt. However, its largest flaw, from our perspective, is that it outputs HTML! HTML is just not a proper end-format. It is too difficult to reverse engineer. Markdown, on the other hand, can be rendered into many format. It can be output as HTML, raw text, truncated text, etc. So, while I applaud Guardian for releasing this, it saddens me that we're still attempting to improve on browser-based, user-facing tools which output HTML.