Original link: https://blog.yitianshijie.net/2022/07/10/markdown-and-wysiwyg/
Jimmy Su :
Humans have spent thirty years developing WYSIWYG, but there is a group of people who firmly believe that you don’t need it… The purpose of Markdown is to output the typesetting results, and the writing process does not want to see the typesetting results. For this purpose, it is necessary to memorize a bunch of unreadable texts. instruction.
Writing and typography can be separate things. WYSIWYG Forcing/tempting you to do two things together is not necessarily a good thing.
WYSIWYG means “what you see is what you get”. In the pre-Internet era, writing and typography were almost always independent, and what you saw was not what you got. Many authors have some ideas about how the text will ultimately appear, but in general, their own typesetting is an exception. So using Markdown is more like traditional writing. In fact, the inventor of Markdown , John Gruber, is indeed one of the more traditional writers among technical writers.
Markdown has always emphasized easy to read and easy to write. This easy is first and foremost for HTML. But other than that, compared to the usual WYSIWYG mode of operation, Markdown is much more natural to write. Adding hash, asterisk, and underscore is easier than adding h1, strong, em tags before and after. In the WYSIWYG state, you have to use the mouse to select the text, and then go to the menu to select the style, but it is a kind of interference.
In order to see the typesetting results in real time when using Markdown, people have developed various software, such as Marked 2 , and MarsEdit which I used to write this article. Compared with what you see is what you get, the main disadvantage of Markdown is that it is not easy to learn (that is, what Jimmy Su said above), but this so-called difficulty is probably largely because ordinary computer users have long been accustomed to GUI.
What you see is what you get is an expedient. In practical applications, its meaning is often not so pleasant, but closer to “that’s all for the style, you can use it”. On the contrary, Markdown is “lure” you to find a good designer to help with typesetting (or learn typesetting yourself) – I only indicate that this is the title, and there are no restrictions on what the title looks like. In reality, expediency always wins.
Also, as @zonble said , humans also spent thirty years developing LaTeX .
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