On the subject of Slack and its shortcomings, I'm not happy with the apparently deliberate rolling-back of WYSIWYG for online communication. Early web forums used flat text or manual HTML because browser/tech limitations made WYSIWYG hard or impossible, but that style has somehow become a standard decades after it stopped being technically relevant.
I can kinda-sorta understand it for deliberately minimalistic web interfaces like HN's, but Slack isn't even limited to a web app. Why do I have to use their idiosyncratic markup instead of just hitting Ctrl-I like every other desktop app for the past 20 years? (Underscores for italics, really?) Why can't I make a normal hyperlink with normal link text, instead of ramming a mile-long URL with a big ugly preview image into the chat?
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On the subject of Slack and its shortcomings, I'm not happy with the apparently deliberate rolling-back of WYSIWYG for online communication. Early web forums used flat text or manual HTML because browser/tech limitations made WYSIWYG hard or impossible, but that style has somehow become a standard decades after it stopped being technically relevant.
I can kinda-sorta understand it for deliberately minimalistic web interfaces like HN's, but Slack isn't even limited to a web app. Why do I have to use their idiosyncratic markup instead of just hitting Ctrl-I like every other desktop app for the past 20 years? (Underscores for italics, really?) Why can't I make a normal hyperlink with normal link text, instead of ramming a mile-long URL with a big ugly preview image into the chat?