I'd love to implement this instead of a WYSIWYG into our platform, but the problem is our users (non-technical) are not going to take the time to learn markdown. Even if we had a guide on the right I have a hunch they would still be super confused.<p>Idea: Add buttons to the top (optional) that LOOK like a WYSIWYG (something they are familiar with), that simply apply markdown around text.<p>I think you'd see such much wider adoption with that addition, which is something I'd love to happen, because WYSIWYG's do indeed suck.
What'd I'd love to see is something that is a WYSIWYG interface for editing Markdown. Markdown is fantastic and awesome because it limits what people can do, but expecting clients to learn it is a pain in the arse.
This is similar in many ways to MarkItUp (<a href="http://markitup.jaysalvat.com/" rel="nofollow">http://markitup.jaysalvat.com/</a>), which I've had good experiences with.<p>One potential pitfall with JavaScript preview of Markdown (or Textile, or any other similar language) is that if you're not using the same script to transform the content at the server side, the final output can contain subtle differences. Not all implementations are precisely equal. If differences do occur, that can be frustrating for the user who just carefully previewed their work.<p>An alternative (albeit a more resource intensive one) would be to make ajax requests back to the server and have it perform the transformation and return it to the page. Unfortunately, that's probably not going to be satisfactory for realtime previewing.