(2022-05-06) Bjarnason What I Learned About Markdown From Interviewing A Bunch Of People

Baldur Bjarnason: What I learned about markdown from interviewing a bunch of people. I can’t remember when I first started to use plain text files for my notes and other writing. It would have been some time after 1995 when I was 18 and had recently spent the money I’d earned on my part-time job on a down payment for a Mac Performa.

My go-to application on the SE (commonly nicknamed the “kýrauga” in Icelandic, literally “porthole”) was Microsoft Word. Anything I typed I typed in Word. A small black and white screen, Word 5.1

With the upgrade came a transition to MS Word 6.0

The performance and UX disaster that was Word for Mac 6.0 is well-documented elsewhere

when Word disappointed on the Performa I began to search for alternatives. I tried ClarisWorks for a while. Even tried Nisus Writer.

As you might guess, all this switching meant that file format compatibility became a bit of an issue. And given that most of this was just notes and other personal writing, I eventually settled on plain text and BBedit Lite and have since then mostly stuck to plain text as my primary format for taking digital notes.

I had forgotten about all of this when I was preparing for the user research interviews I had set up for my Colophon Cards project.

I got around a dozen people volunteering for an interview, which I split into two cohorts

It’s not the sort of study you do to get conclusive actionable data. Too few participants; too unstructured; a self-selected group of expert users.

I view these results more as a starting point for further testing and research.

Quite a few of the respondents looked like habitual app switchers and I wanted to find out why.

The switch for most wasn’t to markdown or a markdown app. They switched to plain text because that format works everywhere with everything. (open standards)

What they wanted was the portability and interoperability of plain text. Markdown just made plain text more usable.

whether the writing widgets in the apps I work on should be based on rich text or on markdown?

HTML markup tends to be clearer for many elements

A bigger issue is that HTML and markdown have drifted apart

But these issues generally don’t matter if you’re writing for yourself and don’t plan on converting the text into HTML or PDF. In those cases, the primary value is the non-proprietary nature of plaintext and the features that markdown provides are just gravy on top

I’m not a fan of many of the current trends in rich text editing either.

Rich text editors today also tend to rely on margin or command menu buttons that are so over-loaded

The minimalist rich text editors, on the other hand, tend to be too minimal

Rich text widgets are also notoriously hard to implement properly (usably and accessibly) on the web.

Rich-text widgets also raise the spectre of interoperability.

Markdown has one clear advantage over HTML, which is that most of its block-defining markup is either invisible or as-good-as invisible.

I’d like to split this issue into a number of smaller problems to tackle:

A few years ago, I decided to switch most of my note-taking to analogue (paper)

What I found out was that my productivity and understanding of what I was working on didn’t decrease at all. Instead, it increased with my enjoyment

*My fountain pens and index cards made me realise that note-taking, esp. when you include annotation, shares many of the same problems, both in implementation, the lack of variation from the basics, and the lossy translation from print. Most importantly, they all tend to lack a sense of joy.

Hence, Colophon Cards. It might not end up being revolutionary but hopefully, with enough work, it’ll add some polish to the note-taking app genre.*