NYCPHP Meetup

[csnyder]

On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 10:12 AM, Jake McGraw <jmcgraw1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Forget diffs and HTML text, this problem totally ate up all my time at
> a startup where a JavaScript WYSIWYG editor was the only choice for
> generating a marked-up document. May I suggest Markdown [1,2] + the
> Showdown preview panel [3]. Markdown is a very light syntax for
> generating HTML documents, Showdown gives you a preview of your
> document while you're editing the textarea. I have already converted
> one custom CMS to Markdown and I think it's been quite successful.
>
> [1] http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
> [2] http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
> [3] http://attacklab.net/showdown/
>
> - jake
>

The biggest problem I've seen, that isn't solved by a switch to
markdown or any other meta-markup technique, is that CMS users
increasingly just want to paste in HTML snippets that include embedded
objects, and have them work.

Think YouTube, Vimeo, Google spreadsheets, Wufoo forms, all that crap.

Markdown is great -- GREAT -- if you have enlightened editors and
copywriters who agree that it's easier to use a simple syntax in order
to create consistent results. It can even be combined with a WYSIWYG
rich-text editor to get the best of both worlds.

But it falls down as soon as you ask non-technical people to use it in
place of HTML, because they don't really understand what HTML or
Markdown is and why they should care, they just want to embed their
widgets and move on.

What Hans is looking for is a way to reliably get just the first few
"lines" of any HTML document, whether it is properly HTML-formatted or
not, without truncating embedded elements.

   chris.