exactly what a true webmaster does not want

nothing will ever be superior to the control one has when hard coding one’s posts, such as adding alt and title tags to images, and putting text in p tags instead of stripping them like wordpress does, which actually breaks w3c xhtml rules.

Sorry but I don’t understand the points you raise here. Surely the point of a good editor is to avoid having to hard code your posts, is it not? If a theme has been setup correctly, then you shouldn’t even need to touch the source within WordPress admin. That applies to both the classic and Gutenberg editors.

Also, my understanding is that WP doesn’t strip P tags at all – just hides them in the ‘Text’ mode when editing (P tags are visible on the front end, so W3C compliance isn’t an issue), but these can be shown again with a simple function in your theme.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by wickywills.

@wickywills,

Sorry but I don’t understand the points you raise here. Surely the point of a good editor is to avoid having to hard code your posts, is it not?

It might be. But neither the current/classic editor in visual mode nor Gutenberg achieve anything like 100% accuracy, so @sakyant’s point that “nothing will ever be superior to the control one has when hard coding one’s posts” remains 100% valid.

Savvy Gutenberg supporters point out that you can use a slash and a few letters to pick the next “block”. But how is that superior to (or shorter than) simply writing <p> and </p> to enclose a paragraph? Clearly, it isn’t. And hardcoding the html is guaranteed to produce the right results every time, which neither Gutenberg nor classic in visual mode can claim.

I’d also point out that there are plenty of great rich text editors around for the desktop that don’t require the user to type the html tags, but which insert them automatically with 100% reliability. So the writer can compose content with one of them and then just copy and paste that text into WordPress. But that, of course, is only possible if WordPress provides a mode that is guaranteed not to make a mess of what is already perfect html. Gutenberg provides no such guarantee.

But how is that superior to (or shorter than) simply writing <p> and </p> to enclose a paragraph?

Because normal people who write things don’t do that and don’t want to do that?

If you want to edit your HTML directly, then the editor has a mode to let you do just that. You can directly edit the HTML for the whole post, or on a per-block basis.

Because normal people who write things don’t do that and don’t want to do that?

Perhaps so. But why, then, would they want to type a slash and a set of letters instead?

If you’re referring to the block quick selection mode, that’s more of a convenience thing rather than anything required.

The way I started looking at the new editor was to simply do as I was doing before. My previous workflow was basically like this:

– Write the post in a text editor
– Copy/paste it into the TinyMCE editor
– Add things like images, links, and proofread the text as I go.

This isn’t a bad workflow, but with the new editor I can type it in right to the editor. As I hit enter, it automatically starts new paragraph blocks for me. I then do much the same process as before, I proofread it, maybe rearrange it a bit, add new blocks for images where they are needed in the text, and linkify all the links that I wanted to add but didn’t want to stop typing to do right away.

By and large, it’s an editor, not a page builder. You don’t need to stop while writing and do things from top to bottom. Unless that’s how you work, in which case, more power to you. But as an editor, for me, I find that it’s a bit simpler and easier to work with when I’m doing the process of editing. No need to learn about img tags or to mess with HTML when I’m just moving the text around and arranging it in the way I want it presented.