RHrhythmvs·Apr 10, 2015
Great work! Always happy to see people working towards a WYSIWYG editor for Markdown.
I did a similar project¹, with strong focus on editing math, inline, and “real time” wysiwyg. It failed. The problem is that most such approaches treat Markdown as _code_ instead of _text_, and inevitably mistake syntax highlighting for semantic, text-driven styling (as if one would style nouns, verbs, adjectives, instead of <h1>, <p>, <em>, etc.). Thus they use a code editor such as CodeMirror (like this one does, too). And then you must style `.cm-` syntax markers instead of the eventual (html) nodes that would be the output of a real Markdown parser. Which makes it impossible to just throw in any arbitrary html5 css-stylesheet. Which is imho the whole point of wysiwyg Markdown editing.
What you’d really want instead is true Markdown parsing, which nor
Read the rest
malizes the user’s input into a parse tree, then renders to clean html. But syncing input and output over an AST is quite impossible as long as Shadow DOM is not available in browsers. Cfr interesting discussion, over at Github (re: Quill editor).²
As for Markdown parsers: there’s many of them. The OP’s project uses @chjj’s marked.js³: wouldn’t harm to mention that on the homepage or in the README, since behavior (markdown interpretation) is very different from parser to parser. (I used to maintain a repo which lists all available Markdown parsers, apps, etc.)⁴
Meanwhile there’s CommonMark⁵, of course, which has already some really fast implementations in JavaScript. (Plus, they’re “Standard” ;-)⁶ Would be nice to see one of the CommonMark reference implementations incorporated into a WYSIWYG editor like this one.
¹ https://github.com/rhythmus/mathdown
² https://github.com/quilljs/quill/issues/74#issuecomment-4294...
³ https://github.com/chjj/marked
⁴ https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources
⁵ http://commonmark.org
⁶ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8264733