Cut and paste to and from plain text editor loses formatting+discussion

In your particular case, if you currently have a bunch of text in some markup, then the easiest way to transfer it to pretty much any platform that doesn't happen to support that particular markup variant (and there are TONS), is to render it to html and then copy it.  If you've currently got it in some markup, then it must have been somewhere that can render it to a normal HMTL webpage.  Do that, then cut and paste, and you're done.

fwiw, I definitely don't see how the wiki syntax address addresses the everyone-loves-a-different-editor issue.  (a) Everyone loves a different markup, and (b) it's generally much harder to convert from an editor to marked-up text than to HTML, which is what most WYSIWYG editors, including ours, use.

In terms of our storage, no problem: we're using HTML, which, in fact, you can edit directly via the wysiwyg.  The only exceptions are links and inclusions, the syntax for which is documented here.   

So the lingua franca argument is ANTI-markup, not PRO-markup.  The only lingua franca on the web in the markup realm is HTML (M = markup), and only wysiwyg edits directly in that forma.  There are several other good reasons for markup (fast for experienced users, explicit, etc), but the lingua franca is against.

As for the one-more-editor, wagn has not reinvented this particular wheel -- we're using tinyMCE, one of the most widely used wysiwyg editors out there.

In general, there is no way that any platform will support bidirectional cut and paste to and from every known format unless it already has built-in knowledge of every known format.  I suppose you could shoot for that, but in any event, it makes sense to start with the most common format -- HTML -- and work from there.

If HTML is it, then please document

if there are any limitations I should be aware of. Rather than just inserting

, ,

or
, can I also insert

, can I also insert
, , , , etc. complicated

or

Once the HTML is stripped, it's gone (even from source) and there's no way we can look at it.

I do agree that we should document what HTML is allowed in Basic cards.

  --John Abbe.....Thu Nov 10 22:44:02 -0800 2011