★ Prestructured WYSIWYG
Even if you’re a decent designer (or believe yourself to be), it’s liberating not to have a say in the matter. Constraints are sometimes freeing.
I recently stumbled upon a fantastic article written by Glenn Fleishman titled "Why Notes Will Never Let Us Edit Markdown." This piece resonated with me so much that I felt compelled to link to it. The reason I had been hesitant to write about Apple Notes and its expanding support for Markdown import/export and copy/paste was because Notes employs a unique text formatting concept that doesn't have a specific name. Naming this idea would have made writing about it much easier.
I propose calling this concept "prestructured WYSIWYG." Apps like Apple's Messages and Notes are excellent examples of this design philosophy, and I am a strong advocate for it. Prestructured WYSIWYG offers a low-key yet incredibly effective approach to formatting text. Apps like Apple's Messages and Notes exemplify this idea, and I find it to be one of the best ideas and trends in software design in the last 15 years.
In Notes, you can apply WYSIWYG styles like bold and italics, but you can't choose different typefaces or define your own styles. The "Aᴀ" formatting popover allows you to change preset styles, but it doesn't provide a control to change the typeface. In the early days of the Mac, when text was either plain text or rich text, people expected to have the freedom to choose any font they desired.
However, this era of unrestricted WYSIWYG came with technical and aesthetic problems. On technical side, the list of fonts installed on my computer isn't the same as the list of fonts on your computer. Each operating system comes with its own set of included fonts, and the people most interested in selecting their own typefaces are the same ones most likely to install third-party fonts. Both of these issues cannot be easily solved.
Prestructured WYSIWYG solves these problems by providing expressive abstract semantic styles like bold, italics, and monospace, as well as larger sizes for headings. However, it avoids both the technical problems related to missing fonts and the aesthetic issues of people making terrible typographic choices. If you use Apple Notes or Messages, you are better off liking Apple's San Francisco system font family, because that's what you'll get.
It's great for accessibility, as all type sizes are relative, not absolute, and these preset styles map well to Markdown, which has no concern with font choices or specific text sizes.
Written by urgent.news from Daring Fireball's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
