sakamies's comments

Westoncb said it quite elegantly: "I think the core idea involved is a shift away from using text as a model for representing programs; instead, interact with more abstract representations of code, and render those abstractions as text. This allows your editor to have better understanding of the language you're using, so syntax becomes a property of a language's visualization rather than something totally central to it (and now you don't have to memorize it!)."

Foolproof HTML of course tries to do that only for HTML, but I do hope I can expand it to CSS, JSON and maybe generalize it later on.

So I'm not advocating for any specific syntax, but rather a way to edit html so you don't need to care about the syntax. The HTML syntax would still be there in the .html (or .erb, .php or whatever your template language is) the same as it has always been, but you could visualize it in a way that's most comfortable to you and edit it as a structure, so it would be impossible to produce syntax errors.

This could end up being a text editor plugin or a stand alone app, some sort of library or kind of anything, but I'm prototyping interactions and ideas as a standalone web app because that's what I'm good at.

My story is kind of similar, including the wrist pain part. I've been brewing this thing for a bit over ten years. I got burnt out for other work and the editor some years ago and had to take a long break. Last year I started about the tenth new prototype and finally got it on a path that I think could lead to something that actually works.

This time I'm trying to give away the code, ideas and everything, so maybe someday someone would continue the work so I won't have to. I just want to see it get made somehow and use the damn thing.

Your editor looks insanely slick! I had no idea there was prior work in this area. It sounds like your editor could trivially support html.

That last paragraph is exactly what I was thinking with foolproof html, except applied to markup/data languages.

Is your editor available to try somewhere?

Hi! Article aithor here.

Emmet is a great plugin that has tag matching and all kinds of navigation/editing shortcuts too. Like those emacs shortcuts, it does reduce error rates and speed up editing signifigantly, at least for me, but I'm more interested in exactly a heavy handed approach. I'd like an app/plugin/whatever that makes it impossible to make many types of mistakes, even if it restricts what I can do.

I code html every day (and I do love it), but I'm a terrible and lazy typist. I make typos and mistakes constantly, so I'll take all the help I can get. So I'm trying to make something that will solve my specific woes in html/css development and I'm hoping someone else finds it useful too.

I agree, that much assumptions in the keyboard handling could get irritating quickly. Keyboard combos for actions would be the obvious choice, but I'd like to have something more automatic too.

Would you mind adding an issue about improving readability at github, or even better, making a fork and adding the improved styling? https://github.com/sakamies/css-vocabulary/issues