You’ve probably seen web editors based on the idea of blocks. I’m typing this in WordPress, which has a little + button that brings up a long list of potential blocks that you can insert into this page […]

This kind of “insert block” user interface concept is showing up in almost every blogging tool, web editor, note-taking app, and content management system. People like it and it makes sense.

We have seem to have standardized on one thing: the / key to insert a new block. Everything else, though, is completely proprietary and non-standard.

I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if blocks were interchangeable and reusable across the web?

-Joel Spolsky, of Stack Overflow fame, talking about his new project

There’s a growing expectation that you should also be able to author block content in modern content applications. People have started to get used to delightful user experiences that works and looks nice [lol -nost], and where you aren’t expected to have to learn specialized syntax. Medium popularized the notion that you could have delightful and intuitive content creation on the web. And speaking of “notion”, the popular note app has gone all in on block content, and lets users mix max from a wide range of different types.

- Knut Melvær, who’s involved in a competing (?) unified-“block”-spec

Who are all these “people” who supposedly love block-based web editors???

I’ve used three of them before, I think, and all three are janky and awkward and a strict downgrade relative to a word processor / Google Docs.