# WYSIWYG Plugin (again)

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/wysiwyg-plugin-again/39747>\
**Category:** Feature\
**Tags:** completed\
**Created:** [February 17, 2016, 6:18pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/wysiwyg-plugin-again/39747 "2016-02-17T18:18:46Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 3

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**Author:** ![Tom\_Newsom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/tom_newsom/32/115981_2.png) [@Tom\_Newsom](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Tom_Newsom)\
**Post date:** [February 17, 2016, 8:46pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/wysiwyg-plugin-again/39747/3 "2016-02-17T20:46:37Z")

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(Ground rule of this Topic: No Politics!)

1: So, the problem with 1. (and it’s “the problem” that Jeff identifies in his anti-wysiwyg essay) is that in a strict markup+preview model, you can’t accurately translate the cursor position from the preview to the markup. It becomes very easy to make broken/interleaved tag pairs, especially with markdown’s identical opening and closing tags.

The “best option” identified from the previous thread, [ProseMirror](http://prosemirror.net/) gets around “the problem” by using an intermediary format that has none of markdown’s confusions. It’s rigidly and flat, and works as you’d expect a rich text editor to work. Try as I could, I couldn’t make it break by bolding, italiccing, listing and de-listing arbitrary chunks of text.

It has nice `ToCommonMark` and `FromCommonMark` functions but they don’t support all the features of Discourse’s editor (most importantly, HTML) so as we were warned, it would only be “flawless” on a blank installation.

3: I guess my no.1 concern with such a scheme would be: What happens when/if the plugin is removed? What happens when you try to edit a post that is actually a big blob of html? What happens when you edit a pre-existing markdown post with the new plugin?

I admire this effort, and might even contribute financially if it comes to it (and it appears doable). But I’m not optimisitc. I think Sam’s warnings are real (and he should know).  
The problem has so many edge cases, there’s barely anything left in the core 😃

I think a “first shot” should be an implementation of ProseMirror, that sits on top of the existing editor, reading and writing to the editing area with `FromCommonMark` and `ToCommonMark` - It’ll be clumsy and I’m sure performance will take a hit, but it’s probably a realisitically achievable goal.

I have absolutely zero applicable skills with which to attempt any of this 😛

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