Random Thoughts – Randocity!

WordPress is a somewhat popular text blogging platform. It is, in fact, the blogging platform where this blog is presently hosted. This post is intended to offer up some background history of WordPress and where WordPress is currently heading (hint: not in a good direction). Let’s explore.

Original Editor — Circa 2003

When WordPress.com launched in 2003, a very basic text editor was included with the interface. This text editor was the defacto editor for the WordPress platform until around 2015, when Calypso launched. This very basic text editor was not HTML aware nor did it in any way support any advanced HTML features. As a WordPress user, you had to use trial and error methods to determine if the editor itself and the underlying submission syntax checker would allow any specific inline HTML or CSS features to be published.

This basic editor also did not support or even render such basic styling features like the application of styles like underline, italics or bold or even changing fonts and sizes. If you wanted to use these features within your article, you were forced to use hypertext markup to “wrap” lines of text with such formatting styles. This made editing and re-editing articles a chore because the editor itself did not render this markup at all, which meant you had to stumble over all of the markup when reading your article back. If you wanted to see the article fully rendered including these styles and markups, you were forced to preview the article in your WordPress theme.

In other words, a few markup features worked, but many, many did not. If you included hypertext markup in your article, you also had to know how to craft hypertext markup properly. You were then forced to test if the markup that you included would be accepted by the platform. This made crafting hypertext markup complicated, slow and required a huge learning curve. The editor itself showed you the entire article, markup and all, which made reading an article using this editor a complete pain in the ass. Note that this editor still exists in the platform as of this writing, through the wp-admin interface. It’s also still just as clumsy, antiquated and problematic as it always was.

This 2003 editor fares even worse today after you’ve edited an article in 2018’s Gutenberg, where Gutenberg crafts its blocks using a massive number of really ugly HTML comment and statements. It’s impossible to read an article’s text in among Gutenberg’s prolific and ugly markup when viewing it in such a basic editor. 2015’s Calypso, on the other hand, has tried to keep its markup limited, which served an author much better if you had to dive into HTML for any specific reason. Sometimes simpler is better!

Enter Calypso — Circa 2015

Around 2015, WordPress introduced a new editor called Calypso. This new editor at least supported  basic live text style rendering; rendering that now allows you to see underline, italic and bold formatted live in the editor itself while writing. In essence, Calypso offered writers a similar experience as when using a software word processing product like Microsoft Word. Calypso even supported keyboard hotkeys to set these styles, making writing much easier.

No longer are you required to trip over ugly HTML markup statements. Limited hypertext markup is further included and is often rendered by the Calypso editor. Such rendered markup includes embedding images, YouTube videos and other basic multimedia inclusions like image slideshows. No longer did you need to go documentation hunting for the right WordPress tags to get this information included. This means that if you drop a link to a YouTube video in, the editor is aware that it’s a YouTube video and might render the video itself inline in the editor. The Calypso editor also crafted whatever HTML markup was needed to get this multimedia rendered properly. Early in the life of Calypso, YouTube UI rendering didn’t occur. It wasn’t until a few later releases that it began to render the videos in the editor. Advanced CSS styling and features, however, were mostly beyond the Calypso editor, but it can be included in an article by selecting “Edit as HTML” and manually adding it, as long as the syntax parser allows the syntax through. This situation pretty much exists today even with Gutenberg.

For about a 3-4 year period, WordPress was on the right track with the Calypso editor, making enhancements and bringing it up to date each year. Calypso was then a somewhat simplistic HTML editor, yes, but it was leaps and bounds better than the original WP Admin editor that was introduced in 2003. As a blog author, you were still forced to preview every article to make sure that it formatted properly in your site’s theme. Calypso’s performance as an editor is still unmatched, even today. Calypso launched and was ready to use in under 3 seconds when beginning a new article. Impressive! Very, very impressive!

The entire Calypso editor, while writing, remained speedy and responsive. In other words, if you typed 200 words per minute, the editor could fully keep up with that typing pace. Calypso didn’t then (and still doesn’t now) offer spell or grammar checking or perhaps some of the advanced features that would come to future editors, but not much in the blogging world at that time did. Though, these features could have been added to Calypso. Instead, WordPress.org had other not-so-brilliant ideas and then Gutenberg happened.

Enter Gutenberg — Circa 2018

In 2018, Gutenberg launches and replaces Calypso within WordPress.com. However, because Calypso had been so entrenched in the platform due to its adoption and use over those ~3 years, the Gutenberg team was more or less forced to continue supporting Calypso inside of the Gutenberg editor. The way the Gutenberg team managed this was by encapsulating the Calypso editor into what would become known as Gutenberg’s “Classic Block”. The inclusion of this block type is solely designed for backward compatibility with Calypso crafted articles.

Let’s postulate an insane request if WordPress had requested this action of bloggers after Gutenberg’s introduction. What if WordPress had required perhaps thousands of bloggers to check every article ever written for compatibility after auto-upgrading every article to Gutenberg blocks? Gutenberg’s article upgrade system has never worked very well at all. WordPress clearly wasn’t this level of insane to require this of its bloggers.

Once you also understand the ineptitude of the Gutenberg development team and how Gutenberg actually works (or doesn’t), you’ll understand why this didn’t happen and why it was simpler to integrate Calypso into Gutenberg’s Classic Block instead of asking every blogger to ensure their converted articles are still properly formatted. Yeah, if WordPress had required this step, the WordPress.com platform would have died. Thus, Calypso compatibility was built.

Gutenberg’s Misguided Design and Philosophy

Gutenberg was touted as a mixed media extravaganza for blogging, except for one thing. WordPress is STILL intended to be a text blogging platform. It’s not YouTube, it’s not Snapchat, it’s not Twitter and it’s not TikTok. You don’t need this type or level of multimedia extravaganza in a text blogging editor for the vast majority of blog posts. It’s useless and it’s overkill. Yet, the Gutenberg team blazed onward with its incredibly misguided development idea.

The need to embed graphics, YouTube, TikTok and other mixed media within a blog post is self-limiting, simply by the sheer fact that WordPress is still designed to be a written blog article platform. Embedding such mixed media might encompass 1-5% of the total volume of an article, mainly used to support written talking points, not as a primary blogging mechanism. I’m not advocating not adding these multimedia features, but I’m also not advocating that these features become the primary reason to make a new blog editor either.

The Gutenberg development team ultimately spent an inordinate amount of time over-designing and over-coding what is now essentially a technical replacement for cut and paste; the entire block design that Gutenberg touts. Cut and paste already exists. We don’t need a new way of doing it. Honestly, a replacement for cut and paste really IS the entire claim to fame for Gutenberg’s block system. Effectively, the Gutenberg block system was designed for ease of moving the blocks around… or at least, so we’ve been led to believe. In reality, moving blocks around is an absolute chore when attempting to use the up and down arrow controls. As a technical replacement for cut and paste, Gutenberg is an abject failure.

Further, even though Gutenberg touts its ability to work with WordPress themes, that feature has never properly worked and Gutenberg is not and has never been WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get). You would think that even though Calypso was never intended to offer WYSIWYG rendering, implementing a brand new editor in WordPress would offer this very important feature to bloggers. If you thought that, you’d have thought wrong. With Gutenberg, you are still forced to preview articles using your site’s theme to see the exact placement of everything. Gutenberg’s supposed use of themes is so basic and rudimentary that placement of almost anything, like even an image, almost never works in the same way as the theme’s placement.

However, Gutenberg’s main and biggest problem today is STILL its performance. Honestly, it’s one of the worst performing text editors I have ever used. The 2003 editor still outperforms than Gutenberg by an order of magnitude. If you’re writing a one paragraph one block article, Gutenberg might be fine. When you’re writing a 5,000 word blog article broken into maybe 50 or more blocks, by the final Paragraph Block, the input performance is so bad that the small flashing letter cursor lags behind keyboard input as much as 5 words (maybe even more based on your speed of typing). If you’re a 200 WPM typist with an even 1% error rate, good luck writing an article in Gutenberg. This lagging issue MUST have been apparent to the developers… unless they’ve tested nothing, which appears to be the case.

Gutenberg has failed at almost every design case it has tried to achieve! Calypso still outperforms Gutenberg in almost every single way, even when embedded in the “Classic Block”. It’s the entire reason I exclusively write using the “Classic Block” in WordPress.

Gutenberg doesn’t enhance the blogging experience at all. Just opposite, in fact. Gutenberg gets in your way. It’s slow. It gets worse. The Paragraph Block is so bare bones basic that it can’t even perform a simple spell check, let alone provide grammar checking. Yet, its input performance is so ironically slow for being as basic as it is. Honestly, both WordPress.com and WordPress.org (authors of Gutenberg) are deluded if they think Gutenberg is the answer to blogging. Calypso as an editor was way more useful and powerful than Gutenberg has ever been. Yet, here we are… stuck with this dog slow dinosaur that was foisted onto us unsuspecting WordPress bloggers.

Within 3 months of its release, Calypso’s dev team reduced its launch time from 10 seconds down to less than 3 seconds. In the nearly 6 years since Gutenberg’s launch, almost nothing has improved with Gutenberg, least of all its solid 15 seconds launch timing. You’d think that in nearly 6 years, the Gutenberg team could have made Gutenberg perform better along side adding important blogging features, like spell and grammar checking. Again, you’d have thought wrong. Of course, by all means let’s add embedding of YouTube videos in a block. But no, let’s not add spell or grammar checking to the Paragraph Block to enhance the entire reason why WordPress exists… writing. Oh no, let’s not fix the editor crashing which forces bloggers to reload the entire editor page and lose work that, you know, helps bloggers do the thing they’re here to do… write! By all means, let’s not fix the lag that builds up after 10, 50 or 100 blocks that lags input down to unbearable levels that prevents bloggers from doing the one thing they’re here to do… write!

No, instead let’s build useless block system, that technical replacement for cut and paste, that only serves to get in the way of blogging, slow everything down and serves to make the entire editor unstable. How many loss crashes can a blogger endure before realizing the need to write in an offline editor? Once this happens, what use is Gutenberg to WordPress?

I don’t know what the Gutenberg team is spending their time doing, but they’re clearly not solving  these actual real usability problems within Gutenberg, nor by extension, attempting to enhance and extend WordPress as a text based blogging platform for us writers.

Calypso Lives On

Because the Gutenberg team was forced to retain Calypso within the Classic Block type in Gutenberg, it is the one and only one saving grace and shining light in among the darkness that is now Gutenberg. Without the Calypso editor’s continued availability within Gutenberg, this platform would be dead. Calypso is the sole and single reason why I can still use WordPress to write this article right now. Were I to use the Paragraph Block as the Gutenberg team has intended, instead of being maybe 90% of the way through this writing article at this point, I’d be 10% finished… spending all of that extra time fighting with the major input cursor lag, the hassle of block management and the continual lockups of the editor. Yes, Gutenberg randomly locks up hard when using the Paragraph Blocks, forcing the writer to reload the entire browser tab (and possibly lose some writing effort in the process). Calypso in Gutenberg’s Classic Block retains all of its snap, performance and stability that it formerly had when it was WordPress’s default editor back in 2015. I don’t have to worry about that silly Gutenberg block performance issue.

To this day, I still don’t know why WordPress thinks Gutenberg is better than Calypso… other than for the fact that a bunch of misguided developers spent way too much time coding something that simply doesn’t work.

In the name of brevity, I’m leaving out a WHOLE LOT of Gutenberg problems here; problems that if I were describe each and every one, this article would easily reach 10k to 20k words. I’m avoiding writing all of that because it’s a diversion which doesn’t help make this article’s point. Suffice it to say that everything Calypso had built as an editor was rebuilt into Gutenberg almost rote. Almost nothing new was added to Gutenberg to take Gutenberg beyond Calypso’s features.

Surly Gutenberg Developers and WordPress staff

I should mention that I’ve attempted interacting with the Gutenberg development team, spending my own time submitting valid Gutenberg bug reports to their official bug reporting site… only to be summarily harangued by their developers. When someone treats me with such disrespect, I don’t bother… a fact that I told one of those disrespectful developers. Time is way too short to spend it screwing around with ungrateful, surly people. Unfortunately, this ungrateful surliness has also made its way into the ranks at WordPress.com, in their leadership team and even on down into the support team.

For example, I asked for a feature to be submitted allowing the WordPress user to be able to choose their preferred block upon Gutenberg launch. Instead of actually agreeing and submitting the feature request, I got an unnecessary explanation of why the Paragraph Block exists in the way that it does.

Here is this Support Team member’s quote:

The Paragraph block is the default block in the WordPress Gutenberg block editor because it caters to the most fundamental and common use case when creating content: writing and structuring text.

And yet, the Paragraph Block performs the worst of any block in Gutenberg. If the Paragraph Block is that important of a block to Gutenberg, so important that it needs to be set as the default launching block, then why do we need all of these other more or less useless mixed media blocks? More importantly than this, if the Paragraph Block holds that level of importance to Gutenberg, why doesn’t it just work? If Gutenberg is supposed to revolutionize the blogging industry with its “new” mixed media approach, why can’t we set our default launching block to be something other than the Paragraph Block? No, WordPress, you can’t have it both ways.

It’s actually quite difficult for me not to hold that developer’s (and, by extension, WordPress staff’s) bad attitude against Gutenberg’s lack of quality. I still don’t understand why a developer would continue to write (bad) code for a project when they’re that disenchanted with writing it? It’s also not that this user’s bad attitude stemmed from my single interaction. Bad attitudes almost always originate internally and extend onto customer interactions. People who are that disenchanted with the products they are supporting probably need to find better jobs where the management team actually cares about the products they sell.

Design Failure

WordPress is a text-based blogging platform. There is no disputing this fact. However, the Gutenberg editor along with the Gutenberg team seem to want to rework this fact by adding Gutenberg’s strange mixed media features. In addition to the technical replacement for cut and paste along side these mixed media inclusions, one feature noticeably missing from Gutenberg is enhancements to the Paragraph Block itself, features that if added would majorly help in making writing simpler, easier and faster; with writing being the whole point to why WordPress exists.

For example, Google’s Gmail email editor has, for many years now, included grammar and spell checking via inline popup helpers. These helpers aid writers in crafting more professionally written articles. While the Gutenberg team was spending its lion’s share of its time crafting a technical replacement for cut and paste (its entire block system), Google spent its time helping writers to, you know, actually write. Even other platforms like Medium have drastically improved its own editors by helping writers to write better.

To this day (nearly 6 years after Gutenberg’s launch), the Paragraph Block still doesn’t offer grammar or spell checking built-in. Instead, the Gutenberg editor throws all of that back to the browser to handle. While Firefox does have a rudimentary spell checker built-in, it does not offer grammar checking at all. After all, Firefox is a generic web browser, not a writer’s tool, unlike WordPress and Gutenberg which are intended to be writer’s tools.

Unfortunately, the dictionary included in Firefox is also exceedingly basic and is missing many valid words. This means that it is, once again, left to the writer to determine if the red underline showing under a word is valid. Firefox does offer replacement suggestions, but only if you choose to right-click on the word, requiring active writer interaction. Once again, Firefox is not intended to be a writer’s tool, but WordPress and Gutenberg are! Yet, both WordPress and Gutenberg refuse to build the necessary tools to help writers write better. Instead, they offers us the questionable mix-media extravaganza editor with a poor technical replacement for cut and paste; an editor that isn’t even properly supported or managed and is broken more often that it works.

If Gutenberg is what we writers and bloggers get to look forward to for the next 6 years at WordPress, perhaps it’s time move to a different blogging platform. WordPress, word up!

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