Ken CaseMay 20

"Native apps are bad at rendering text" is interesting framing. Web browsers are native apps, after all, and they're great at rendering web text. Native PDF viewers are great at rendering PDF text. And native rich text editors are great at RTF text—with rulers containing tab stops, etc.

(Back in the '90s, I built parsers and renderers for all three of these: OmniWeb on AppKit, OmniPDF on AppKit, and RTF text for Java.)

The very real, hard problem is round-tripping content between text systems.

Show threadKen CaseMay 20

Modern HTML + CSS + JavaScript is an incredibly complex text system that can really only be accurately rendered by a modern browser. A modern browser is a very heavyweight, complex piece of native app code that comes with a ton of overhead.

So if you're already running a browser and rendering content inside it, you've already paid the overhead and why not render Markdown/HTML? But if you're running a much leaner native app, adding a simple Markdown notes field is going to add a lot of overhead.

Show threadHelge HeßMay 20
@kcase Wouldn't you still expect that to be part of Cocoa or whatever the native system is, vs. coming as part of custom apps? Why isn't the Cocoa text system essentially a browser rendering engine? I assume it should be?
(No offence, but even OmniWeb is actually a good example of that. It was beautiful and native, but it was actually really slow, so slow, that most people rather used Netscape via X11 IIRC.)
Show threadsanguishMay 20

@helge @kcase Because WebKit does the rendering?

Rendering vs editing are whole different beasts.

Also, Markdown is an abomination.

Show threadHelge Heß
@sanguish @kcase You must have never tried iCloud Pages or Google Docs if you think browser engines don't edit.
May 20 at 8:18pmWeb
Show threadsanguishMay 20

@helge @kcase I didn’t say they don’t. I said there’s a difference between the two needs.

There is a huge layer on top of the browser rendering to do editing with Google Docs or iCloud Pages. I’ve used both (Google Docs grudgingly)

99% of Cocoa apps don’t need a full page layout editing environment.

Show threadHelge HeßMay 20
@sanguish @kcase I'm confused, this is exactly what the Cocoa text system provides (field editors), and which used to be one of its strongest point 🤔 Drop in an NSTextView and you get a full rich text editor for free.
The main issue is that it is stuck in the past and never got updated for modern needs, isn't it?