First of all, props of course to the Guardian's team, not only for devoting resources to improvement of the CMS field, but open-sourcing it...a concept that is still mostly alien to the modern newsroom.<p>As far as I know, the solution they have here is impressive and as good as the state-of-the-art, in terms of usability and modularity...but it still can't overcome the major quirks that come up with rich-text editors.<p>For example, I typed in the following in the demo (<a href="http://guardian.github.io/scribe/" rel="nofollow">http://guardian.github.io/scribe/</a>):<p>Hello, <i>world</i><p><i>Why italics?</i><p>So the error here is that <i>after</i> typing "world", I switched <i>off</i> the italics and hit line break/Enter. However, the italics-mode persisted into the next line. This was the generated HTML:<p><pre><code> <p>Hello, <i>world</i></p><p><i>Why italics?</i></p>
</code></pre>
As a programmer, I can appreciate why this might happen, and I know how to fix it...but this is the kind of unexpected behavior that is the bane of the layperson, so much so that with each new rich-text environment -- whether it be Word, Google Docs, TinyMCE, etc -- they have to come up with a whole new list of hacks to get around these quirks.<p><i>edit: the rest of this is address to a general "you", not to "you, the Guardian developers", as in, "why didn't you just do Markdown"...though if the Guardian took the lead in that, I'd most definitely upvote that too ;)</i><p>I think rich-text editors are fine for the <i>very</i> layperson. But I think for professional reporters, there needs to be a move toward the expectation that they all learn Markdown. Note, I'm not saying that everyone needs to learn HTML...but Markdown is basically the exact subset of text formatting a professional online writer needs to communicate 99.9% of their reportage material, with the rest being made up through plugins/shortcode/embed, as is currently the case for most online CMSes.<p>Markdown can be written in any editor and is portable to a huge variety of systems and services. More importantly, even without a specialized editor, Markdown still has human-friendly structure. What else does a writer need?<p>Before you say: <i>oh but we can't expect our writers to learn code-like things</i>...this is not true at all. As an intern at the Denver Post, I spent at least a day learning the in-house editor, which was Windows-only, designed for the print-publishing workflow, and had all manner of arcane key combinations to add editing marks (again, for print, and not the web). Everyone was expected to learn it, and everyone did fine.<p>But unlike Markdown, this in-house closed source coding system was...well, shitty as most industry-specific codes are...and once in awhile someone would accidentally "un-hide" notes meant for an editor's eyes only, which would then show up in print. What I love about Markdown is that you don't even have to really know it to write what you need...hitting Enter creates a paragraph break, both in your text editor and the platform to which you publish. How much easier can you get?