John Gruber

Like it's nice when your editor actually does italicize the text between the asterisks.

It's nice, but it still is a monospaced font and you delete the asterisks and it deletes the italics.

There's a line that gets crossed where it's more of a fundamentally WYSIWYG product, and yet you're typing these characters, but then there's like a view mode and an edit mode, and the view mode makes them go away.

And it's like, no, you've gone too far.

And now it's exactly the sort of product that Markdown...

The other thing Markdown was meant as an answer to was, in addition to writing raw HTML, there were the pre-Markdown WYSIWYG HTML editors.

And they sounded great, right?

It's like, oh, you just hit Command-I and you get italics text.

But the problem was, how do you go back to the end of an italicized word and you want to add in word, but no, I don't want it to be italics anymore.

I want the italics to end.

What do I do?

Where's the thing?

And that's where having little punctuation characters that you can just delete.

Either it's there or it's not, and you delete it, and then the italics stops.

So I think what Apple did with Apple Notes is actually great, where they didn't turn it into a Markdown editor where you type Markdown, but what they've done is let you copy Markdown out or export as Markdown.

which is great.

I think that's actually very appropriate for Apple Notes.

I'm now, like I said, put the brakes on this.

Don't expose it to people.

People should have, the Apple Notes app should just be WYSIWYG, where you just say italics, header, and it's an actual menu item.