On WYSIWYG

I guess it's the distinction between text editor and word processor.

Text editors are for writing text. I'm writing this in WriteRoom, the paragon of text editing. If you're not familiar with it, here's its list of features:

• a big black screen wherein you write text.
• uh. that's it[1].

Word processors, as far as I can tell, are for ill-advised corporate chumps to muck around for weeks with color and font settings and what-not trying to find the most hideous combination to decorate their inscrutable mess of incoherently punctuated babble.

Real writers care about content. Their tools are a healthy dose of stimulants, a good keyboard, a thesaurus, and a closed door[2].

See what's not there? A mouse and funny buttons to click on with it.

If styling is needed, it's handled after the writing. Generally by a third-party, like a publisher, or just a default style sheet.

Not that one should write willy-nilly without structure. But the structure cannot come in your way. If you need to reach for the mouse to set a heading or make a list, you're busted. You break flow.

You know where I'm getting at, right? What's the lightest way to structure text? XML of course. OMG I just gave you a heart attack there, right?

I think there are two types of people: those who love Markdown and those who don't know it.[3]

So, down with clickety-clicky buttons that mess up what you type, in with powerful pretty predictable markdown[4].

[1]: it's probably like nano/pico, but with a full Cocoa text control and all the niceties that come with it.

[2]: like a programmer, if you think of it. (And of course you use a thesaurus, how else do you find the bestest names for your classes and methods?)

[3]: I'm oversimplifying. There are those that learnt textile first and can't let go, and then those who got bitten by a craptastic library like BlueCloth.

[4]: I love to sneak in alliterations.

Other issues

My stance on WYSIWYG apart, the current (v6) implementation is totally flaky, specially on Safari, even on Safari 4 with latest WebKit nightly. Some of the below I experienced after I made the Safari jump, but most of it I've been through in Camino, which is the finest latest Gecko, so, pretty much identical to Firefox, only better and without the annoying community and fake XUL UI that drives OCD Mac users insane.

You can paste stuff with line-breaks and have it come back as a single line.(Probably some n00b line-ending conversion bug.)

If you try to enter breaks by pressing return, you get paragraphs. Even in code mode. Which is totally moronic.

And the whole link and page creation process, it's a mess. It's unintuitive for first-time wiki-ers and veterans alike. In very different ways, but it frustrates both.

And what with all the templates thing? It makes the wiki sound more like an over-engineered CMS attempt than a wiki. The first thing about wikis is that they are dead simple.

You know what Joel loves? Throwing away code and restarting from scratch. Really. I read it on the internets. I'd do that to your wiki. No offense, I generally like FogBugz. But the wiki has a smell of second system syndrome.

What more? Finding orphan pages and orphan links is convoluted. Deciding whether to create a whole new wiki that appears on the menu thing or a new wiki page is kinda random. Do we even need this? Maybe for access control? Then again, it has often happened that we needed finer-grained, per page access control.

Oh, and while we're speaking about Markdown (which we aren't, really, at this point, but what the hell), it's not just for wikis. The BugEvents need it too. Sorely. You know what programmers post around? Code. You know what else? Shell output. And what do they have in common? They are only readable with monospaced fonts. But you know what doesn't look so good monospaced? Prose.

Since BugEvent messages are generally a mix of both, Markdown is super mega ideal.

So there. That's enough text and I admit to having edited only the first part, while this last one is ranting randomly as fast as I can type.

I hope FB7 brings me sweet news. I know it's in beta already so it's probably super frozen and feature complete, but I heard joel say something about markdown in the podcast where he mumbles to himself while jeff surfs the Wikipedia, so I'm holding my hopes up.