Why ContentEditable is Terrible - Medium Perspective
I came across some reasoning behind the editor on Medium.com and reasons why contentEditable html5 tags did not work for them. It's written by Nick Santos, one of Medium software engineers. The Medium editor is probably one of the most elegant web html editors there is and, apparently, designing it wasn't that simple a task.
Most of the wysiwyg editors you see these days are broken in one way or another and the html they usually produce is far from optimal. This is probably the number one reason markdown has gained popularity especially among the more tech-savvy crowd. There are many beautiful markdown editors in Ghost and Dillinger to name just a few. However, markdown is definitely not for everyone and Medium has taken another, visually more appealing road.
There's pros and cons in everything. I do like the Medium editor and its simplicity and ease of use. But on the other hand, I'm also a big fan of markdown. There's probably good use cases for both of them. Using contentEditable html5 tags did not work for Medium. It will be interesting to see where where contentEditable will evolve into and what kind of native browser support it will have in the future.