Thanks for writing this...too many of us engineers treat non-technical employees as morons/infants, as if you didn't spend 12+ years of your life learning math and English and aren't able to cope with new text/symbolic systems...Learning Markdown is as easy/difficult as learning a rich-text editor...why do people assume that pressing a button with a cute icon on it is inherently easier than a Markdown convention? At least by learning the few Markdown conventions there are, you get some hands on experience with understanding how literal computer languages have to be...rather than forever treating rich text editors as a magical machine.
God, the hours I've seen co-workers waste, trying to eliminate some errant space in a rich-text-editor-generated hyperlink, by pressing a random sequence of rich-text buttons. A lot of times, they just go straight to the raw HTML to fix things...and if you're already doing that, you're capable of learning Markdown (let's skip the discussion of why editing raw HTML can be even more disastrous).
Kudos to you for being eager to learn new skills...I'm an engineer and a self-taught web dev I wish someone had forced me to learn Markdown much earlier than I had.
Comments
Thanks for writing this...too many of us engineers treat non-technical employees as morons/infants, as if you didn't spend 12+ years of your life learning math and English and aren't able to cope with new text/symbolic systems...Learning Markdown is as easy/difficult as learning a rich-text editor...why do people assume that pressing a button with a cute icon on it is inherently easier than a Markdown convention? At least by learning the few Markdown conventions there are, you get some hands on experience with understanding how literal computer languages have to be...rather than forever treating rich text editors as a magical machine.
God, the hours I've seen co-workers waste, trying to eliminate some errant space in a rich-text-editor-generated hyperlink, by pressing a random sequence of rich-text buttons. A lot of times, they just go straight to the raw HTML to fix things...and if you're already doing that, you're capable of learning Markdown (let's skip the discussion of why editing raw HTML can be even more disastrous).
Kudos to you for being eager to learn new skills...I'm an engineer and a self-taught web dev I wish someone had forced me to learn Markdown much earlier than I had.