Matt McLaughlin

I’ll add more color on GitHub, but I thought I’d reply here. Based on what you took from my original comment I’m feeling as though I didn’t fully express the issue. The core issue to me is the degree to which the UI surfaces the “blockness” of the underlying data structure. I just don’t understand why it’s necessary or considered useful.

I went through each block and 100% of the options available on a per block basis are doable in MS Office without ever surfacing the concept of “block”. You want to apply special formatting like Pull Quotes or Quotes or Lists you just highlight the text and click a button. Want to put in a table or embed? click Insert. Want to move a block of text or image or whatever around on the page, highlight it and click and drag. Want to create a template where the user can’t change the formatting but can type over the lorem Epsom? Totally straightforward in MS Office.

Now that doesn’t mean that under the hood MS Office isn’t on some level dividing text into “blocks”. When you take a bunch of sentences, highlight them and select “list” it’s certainly doing some behind the scenes tagging saying, “this whole thing is a list”. And when you look at the contextual menus in the ribbon it’s clear that Office is applying some semantic meaning to the different structures so that they can bring up the correct contextual functionality. The difference is that MS Office doesn’t surface this structure because it is entirely unnecessary for the user to know how the program is thinking about the data structure. The user just needs to see their text/images/etc.

I think it would be a useful thought experiment for the Gutenberg team to ask, “How much of what we want to achieve is achievable while making the concept of ‘blocks’ totally invisible?” My guess is that with not too much design effort the answer would be 100%, and the project would be much better off for it.