Toward a Better Markdown Tutorial

[codinghorror]

@tomz

If I could simply look at a box or ribbon somewhere onscreen and instantly see the proper “markdown” for the 90-95% cases, I’d be likely to use it.

That’s fine, you can build that alongside the other vectors – tutorial and reference. “Yes, and…”

@tomz

If I could simply look at a box or ribbon somewhere onscreen and instantly see the proper “markdown” for the 90-95% cases, I’d be likely to use it.

Sure, the editor here in discussion has that:

There’s even tooltips that describe what will happen if you click the button, or you can click it to “see what happens”. And of course the editor in discussion has a live preview on the right, which looks like this (expand to see it animate)

It’s true that most basic written communication doesn’t need fancy formatting anyway. Just type. For example, what formatting did your long reply have? I see nothing other than a basic blockquote at the top. No bold, no bullets, no headings…

I think the point is that the “what is Markdown” and tutorial are for people that don’t know anything about text formatting, or markup, or maybe even computers. I remember learning about styles being independent of the document in Microsoft Word in the early 90s and my mind was blown.