Alec

I took the survey as well. Thanks for keeping us up to date Sarah. My main take is that the destructive quality of the WordPress editor should come to an end. I.e. the wpautop filter which means switching between visual and code

It’s high time for coloured syntax highlighting as well. Every other editor I use has syntax highlighting at this point.

There’s an in-depth conversation about screen readers and the code editor on Trac. As none of the good open source code editors offer accessibility, some in the WordPress development community are advocating for staying with a plain text editor. Others are advocating adding many advanced features to the plain text editor for screen reader users while offering an advanced visual code editor at the same time. I.e. treating both screen reader users and non-screen reader users as high priority use cases. The alternative is the rather unpalatable depriving everyone of an advanced code editor.

it’s a very interesting conversation with lots of well-argued views. The current decisions about the WordPress visual editor and code editor will shape the WordPress experience forever (okay not forever, for the next five years).

For those interested, here are all the filters run on the current WordPress editor:

wptexturize – makes fancy quotes etc.
convert_chars – HTML special chars
make_clickable – makes the plain text links clickable
force_balance_tags – makes sure there is no broken HTML
convert_smilies – Emojis
wpautop – without this the linebreaks are lost

A few should surely be optional (wptexturize, convert_smilies, make_clickable). The main one which should go is wpautop as it is responsible for mangling html every time a writer switches from visual editor to code editor. It’s why it’s so hard to post code reliably in a WordPress website without adding a custom editor or turning off the visual editor.

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