Jeff Atwood chimes in on the age old question of HTML vs Markdown/Textile/Custom Markup/etc. Unfortunately he rules out using a WYSIWYG editor with the one line statement:

Nothing’s decided at this point, but we definitely won’t be giving users one of those friendly-but-irritating HTML GUI browser layout controls. Well sure, you wouldn’t give them a friendly-but-irritating HTML GUI browser control, but why not give them a good one? These days it takes a fair bit of effort to find a HTML editor that doesn’t handle the very basics fairly well and Jeff doesn’t seem to be looking at anything more complex than bold, italic and some hyperlinks. I think a lot of people get stuck in a real geek ego thing or remember the really early days of HTML editors and don’t actually evaluate modern editors properly and it’s a real shame.

All these simplified markup languages just don’t make sense to me, why make people learn something new just for some really basic formatting? Is it really that important to have the formatting capability at all?

My view is that you either need good, full featured formatting that a high quality HTML editor would provide, or you really want plain text. Hyperlinks can be added automatically to URLs easily enough which is the main thing you need and if focussing on the content is really what matters you don’t need any formatting markup at all.

Of course, I’ve seen things this way for ages (1, 2).