Keyboard-accessibility isn't the only advantage of formatting characters.
The most frustrating, throw-my-device-at-the-wall issue with 90% of WYSIWYG text editors, is the insane handling of invisible input states.
- If you begin writing a bold word, but want to delete the first character, the style is reset.
- If you’re writing a list and you want to exit out of it, every editor has a different weird convention of doing that.
- I can’t even begin to describe the amount of broken behavior that is entering code in MS Teams (does Microsoft use Slack internally?)
There are some innovative ideas to solve this, like Bike [^1], but nobody goes to the effort of implementing them. So the easiest, most compatible and most intuitive solution are formatting characters like in Markdown.
- If you begin writing a bold word, but want to delete the first character, the style is reset.
- If you’re writing a list and you want to exit out of it, every editor has a different weird convention of doing that.
- I can’t even begin to describe the amount of broken behavior that is entering code in MS Teams (does Microsoft use Slack internally?)
There are some innovative ideas to solve this, like Bike [^1], but nobody goes to the effort of implementing them. So the easiest, most compatible and most intuitive solution are formatting characters like in Markdown.
[^1]: https://www.hogbaysoftware.com/posts/bike-rich-text/