Humans would have light-speed travel and nuclear fusion by now if it weren’t for the collective drag that WYSIWYG editing has imposed on us for the past 40 years. #abolishWYSIWYG

It’s something everybody thinks they want; a product box to check. But it inevitably results in piles of hot content garbage that is impossible to manage, copy, or paste. All semantic meaning is lost, and we wade though this meaningless garbage wasteland every day just to communicate anything at all, poorly. #abolishWYSIWYG

Perhaps the one good use of #AI would be to just correct all the wild shit that happens in WYSIWYG into something semantically meaningful and straightforward. But, for the love of everything good, can we just teach children (and all people) Markdown? #abolishWYSIWYG

@heybenji i feel like i’ve gone down this path a bunch of times but i think what we want are just better open formats. rtf sucks, but draftjs has a pretty compelling json serialization imo. that said i think html is probably the thing i gravitate to more than markdown, which is limiting in its own frustrating ways. we need some way to give arbitrary attribution to runs and blocks of text, html i think is the best because you can go full DTP with it but there’s probably a good serialized format that’s mostly wysiwyg too (probably some postscript/pdf…). i mean, digital files are great, but the printed page - what will compare with it???

@nsfmc Draftjs looks like a nice enough implementation but even in its default form makes consequential choices. Unstyled text is a <div>. Why not a <p>? I know why, which is that <p> typically has padding around it and people want to make single line breaks without typing shift or some such. But, that one choice means that billions of semantic paragraphs on the internet are now <div>s.

@nsfmc Maybe the #semanticweb is meaningless now with #AI that can parse it regardless, but why waste all that energy? The semantic web was and is an incredible idea, and WYSIWYG stomps on it relentlessly and ruthlessly day in, day out.

@nsfmc I don’t think we need better open formats. HTML, CSS, and SVG are fine. What we need is conceptual rigor and the courage to throw a wrench in the garbage-making machine.