The Placeholder Approach:
What I (and others?) would be looking for would behave more like placeholders in a form (meaning with separate form elements).
The basic default behavior now would allow me to list out different sections of the form, like what I wrote (“name”, “location”, and “issue”), but the default template behavior has the same problems as noted before–markdown makes it confusing and user can break it easily.
I think the ideal would be like a normal form, where there is a placeholder for each section (name, location, and issue), but (here’s the difference) the sections would behave independently. So when the user clicks on the name section, the placeholder “name” disappears, but the other sections stay until the user clicks on those too.
I could imagine this being possible (?) with jquery. Each section would have to have its own div with id, and then jquery would allow showing or removing the text of that particular id when the user clicks on it. This would require adding divs into the textarea, however, and I’m not sure how to do that.
I’m investigating that here.
The Template Approach
Probably an alternative would be that the section headers don’t “disappear” when the user clicks. So the section headers (example: Name, Location, and Issue) would be text that would stay on the page. To make it more form-like, compared to the current template default:
- The section header text could not be edited by the user (ie,
contenteditable="false") - The section break points could not be removed by the user
- There would be space below the section header where it’s clear the user can type. In the current default template, they’d have to go to where the text is, hit
return, to create space to type.
Perhaps this is the easier way to do it?