Title: Markdown
Date: 29th April 2021

Well, it took all of five minutes to give up on writing html by hand and install markdown. Python-markdown to be precise as I didn't want a bunch of perl line noise clogging up the tubes.

There's a certain irony there. I've been thumbing my nose at the WYSIWYG paradigm for years now, firmly of the pursuasion that syntactically representing the structure of my documents is the way to go. But the truth is that markdown is pretty much as close as you can get to WYSIWYG in purely textual form. Well there is certainly power to making code as readable as possible, just see the ever growing popularity of python.

The truth is there are somethings WYSISYG handles very well, like bolding text, or changing the font or colour where the change is closely associated with the text. There are times I wouldn't have minded being able to change the colour or emphasis of code in my editor. Of course it sucks at other things, like managing lists, or creating page numbers. Don't get me started on page numbers - I once worked with a team of high paid contract managers and none of them could get page numbers to come out correctly. I became the goto guy for getting the page numbering working and my services were always in demand. I'm an exciting guy, what can I say.

Sometimes I try to imagine a hybrid system where you see the rendered front end, but can selectively reveal the code for certain parts and edit it in place. Perhaps such things already exist.