Tangent: On the note of web based text field for "normal users", what's the best UX you can get while also trying to be as no-JS-friendly as possible? Are there CSS-only tricks to make editing in an input field nice? I'm making a low-JS site, but it also has a lot of input fields, user content generation, etc. In "modern CSS" i feel like Input boxes should be better than they are. Is JS the only way?
Not quite sure what you mean by normal. But if you want a nice input field - as in it allows you to input text and does what you expect with plain text, something like water.css maybe. If you want rich text, the Web was designed to offload this to js. Markdown and other similar systems were created to provide an alternative to this, but there's a barrier to entry because you want more than text. Text plus markup requ…
I just mean .. average users. Where a text box has some very limited features that may be thought of as the baseline, the standard, etc. Not even sure what qualifies as that, but i imagine a lot of users expect to be able to highlight text and make it bold, italics, etc.
I love markdown and want to support it as the primary interface.. but i don't want to solely force it. I'd love a really, really thin layer of JS which just gives in-line highlighting for markdown, for example.
I might try to make it honestly, if i can't find it. But that's a long ways down the road.