We need to bring text editing into the 21st century where rich text is standardized across all platforms and devices. We can send multicolored emoji to just about any device on the planet, but we still can't bold, italicize, underline or color basic text. It's straight up insane.
Think about it: There is no such thing as "plain text", it's just encoding we don't see.
Even if you're a die-hard keyboard jockey, unless you're looking at your command line and mentally parsing raw ANSI encoding like \e[1mBold, you're not using "plain text". There's tons of encoding underneath every text editor and terminal program, you just don't see it. We already have a standard encoding for rich-text, we need to start using it. It's called HTML, and every device with a screen on the planet knows how to display it. We just need to hide the tags everyone bitches about just like vi hides a highlighted line's \e[43mYellow codes. We should never need to see it.
Any place we're able to enter text should support rich text, from boot up screen through to apps. And underneath it should all be HTML. It's like the display compositor on macOS. None of us think about the fact it uses PDF under the hood, right? We're not debating whether it should be done using SVG. It's invisible. This debate should have been settled decades ago.
I've been writing about this in detail for the past several weeks. I swear the tech industry has lost its collective minds. At this point I'm truly wondering if Markdown is some sort of cult. We need to kill these lightweight markup formats with extreme prejudice and start solving the real problem.
We need to bring text editing into the 21st century where rich text is standardized across all platforms and devices. We can send multicolored emoji to just about any device on the planet, but we still can't bold, italicize, underline or color basic text. It's straight up insane.
Think about it: There is no such thing as "plain text", it's just encoding we don't see.
Even if you're a die-hard keyboard jockey, unless you're looking at your command line and mentally parsing raw ANSI encoding like \e[1mBold, you're not using "plain text". There's tons of encoding underneath every text editor and terminal program, you just don't see it. We already have a standard encoding for rich-text, we need to start using it. It's called HTML, and every device with a screen on the planet knows how to display it. We just need to hide the tags everyone bitches about just like vi hides a highlighted line's \e[43mYellow codes. We should never need to see it.
Any place we're able to enter text should support rich text, from boot up screen through to apps. And underneath it should all be HTML. It's like the display compositor on macOS. None of us think about the fact it uses PDF under the hood, right? We're not debating whether it should be done using SVG. It's invisible. This debate should have been settled decades ago.
I've been writing about this in detail for the past several weeks. I swear the tech industry has lost its collective minds. At this point I'm truly wondering if Markdown is some sort of cult. We need to kill these lightweight markup formats with extreme prejudice and start solving the real problem.