Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Writebin, an inline markdown editor

writebin.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 50 posts

Re: Show HN: Writebin, an inline markdown editor

#31

Post by ryanlbrown »

chrismorgan wrote: post #28
ryanlbrown wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for pointing this out. Haven't had much time to consider things like this yet.

I have this request: could you please make security your first priority when you design things? If you leave it until later, it'll keep on being left until later, and it's far too likely never to happen. At the very least, it is likely to be significantly more expensive to implement later and is more likely to have holes.

No, but I want to, I really do. It's just that early designs are more useful if they're pliable.

Re: Show HN: Writebin, an inline markdown editor

#32

Post by aleem »

This is an awesome concept for markdown UI. I know this is still in early stages with more features coming but allowing up/down arrows to move between blocks would make it a lot easier to navigate.

Undo doesn't work which is kind of annoying. That is something that plagues most of the editors using ace, showdown, et al. Could you get away with just text areas?

Re: Show HN: Writebin, an inline markdown editor

#33

Post by _delirium »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #30
evv wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gruber's decision to include html in the markdown "spec" has always perplexed me.

I'm pretty sure that's because Markdown was written specifically for pre-processing HTML blog posts. It was never meant to be a full-on replacement for HTML, but simply a way to make the HTML that you're most likely to use when writing such a post easier to write. If I'm the only person who can post to my blog, there are no security issues introduced by using Markdown. (Or at least, no more security issues than would…

I've used it for that, and the inclusion of HTML is sometimes a nice "escape hatch": you can write pages mostly in Markdown, but include inline HTML when you need to add formatting or interaction to a page that Markdown's own syntax doesn't support.

Some Markdown parsers have an option to sanitize embedded HTML, e.g. Discount, and its bindings in various languages, does a very basic s/http://www.pell.portland.or.us/~orc/Code/discount/

Re: Show HN: Writebin, an inline markdown editor

#34

Post by daGrevis »

This is really cool and I'm really a big supporter for this type of editors!

Some suggestions:

* There should be an option “demo page“,

* Paragraphs should be drag-n-droppable,

* Arrow keys should take me to the previous/next paragraph,

* There should be “a plus icon“ above and below each paragraph,

* Inline editor should contain buttons for “bold“, “italic“ etc..,

* Pressing “the bold button“ when there's a highlighted word should wrap it in two stars etc.;

Is the thing open-sourced? I would like to help improve it and use it in my blog for writing things.

Re: Show HN: Writebin, an inline markdown editor

#35

Post by tommorris »

evv wrote: post #22
chrismorgan wrote: post #13

You might want to be careful about security. Here's a harmless (at the time of writing!) XSS vulnerability: http://writebin.io/d/GTFx9CxV ← that there is an example of the sort of security hole (XSS) this has. Remember: Markdown is by default a *horribly* insecure format.

Gruber's decision to include html in the markdown "spec" has always perplexed me.

The point of Markdown is to abstract away the common HTML use cases in a markup format. There's plenty of HTML semantics where mapping them into Markdown would be both painful and unhelpful. Like, I'm probably one of a small number of weirdos who uses code, samp, kbd and var. Good luck turning those into blobs of memorable punctuation.

Sometimes I want to put custom attributes on links: rel and class, but also RDFa attributes like property and classof. Without the ability to make a link the old-fashioned way, you can't do that.

Markdown gives shortcuts for the common stuff and allows authors to use HTML tags for the fiddly bits that it doesn't optimise. Markdown without HTML fallback for the use cases Markdown doesn't optimize for would make Markdown fairly useless.

If you went the other route and tried to turn all of HTML into Markdown syntax, you'd have an unusable language. Including HTML is the least bad of the options, IMHO.

Re: Show HN: Writebin, an inline markdown editor

#37

Post by wsc981 »

Nice work. I did encounter a double space "bug" when editing existing content. Visually the double space won't appear in the HTML output, but you do notice it while editing and is slightly annoying.

Perhaps a "write to PDF" feature could be a nice addition?

Re: Show HN: Writebin, an inline markdown editor

#39

Post by agumonkey »

For a reason, new documents show an empty page under:

    Chromium Version 32.0.1700.107 (248368)
console shows:

    GET http://writebin.io/f/js/logger.js  2ZNsPsJy:21
    Uncaught ReferenceError: _Logger is not defined toolbar.js:1
    GET http://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js  2ZNsPsJy:29
    Uncaught TypeError: Property 'ToolbarView' of object [object Object] is not a function app.js:1

Re: Show HN: Writebin, an inline markdown editor

#40

Post by roryokane »

daGrevis wrote: post #34

This is really cool and I'm really a big supporter for this type of editors! Some suggestions: * There should be an option “demo page“, * Paragraphs should be drag-n-droppable, * Arrow keys should take me to the previous/next paragraph, * There should be “a plus icon“ above and below each paragraph, * Inline editor should contain buttons for “bold“, “italic“ etc.., * Pressing “the bold button“ when there's a highligh…

The buttons for surrounding text with one or two asterisks/underscores should not be “bold” and “italic”, but rather “strong” and “emphasized”. Those are the HTML tags they generate, which need not look bold and italic. To generate actual and HTML tags in Markdown, you have to write them inline; there is no syntax shortcut.

Also, to add on to your suggestion that buttons should interact with highlighted words, the link-making button that already exists should also wrap a highlighted word with the link instead of overwriting it. For example, if “here” is highlighted, clicking the button should replace it with “[here](|)”, where ‘|’ is the cursor.

Post reply on HN