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(Archived) A developer's suggestion: switch completely from ENML to HTML


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I'm a developer myself. From an engineering perspective, I think the next major release of EN should ditch ENML and use HTML as internal storage instead.

 

Main benefits:

I understand that ENML gives EN more control and perhaps better structured internally. But the development team would spend too much time re-inventing the wheel, and the users have to suffer from some major bugs left unfixed and the limited features.

 

In the long run, it would be beneficial to EN as a business to adopt open standard such as HTML rather than sticking to a proprietary ENML.

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Don't you still need to encode Evernote-specific content in the note? You can do this with XML, since you can create your own tags (ENML is a subset of XML, not HTML). Can you do it with HTML (maybe HTML 5)?? 

 

Aren't there API users who depend on ENML being the Evernote note format?

 

BTW, I don't believe that this will happen any time soon, as that would entail changing all of the notes everywhere that are already encoded in ENML, and that also requires a perfect process for converting ENML to <whatever>ML. Just doesn't seem feasible to me.

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I don't see how changing to HTML would be an improvement. After working with XHTML, I don't think I'd be willing to go back myself, and I certainly wouldn't if I had an app used by 60M+ users around the world. The change could be catastrophic. Is there currently a problem exporting as HTML?

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I have a lot of frustration regarding the "bulletin items" issue mentioned above. I suppose any decent HTML editor would handle it correctly due to many years of development/bug-fixing. Such problems arise because I suppose the development team has to develop the ENML editor from ground up.

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A lot of ENML *is* HTML, or more properly XHTML: http://dev.evernote.com/start/core/enml.php

 

Even so, yeah, needing to develop ENML editors on multiple platforms has caused some grief, I think it's safe to say. On the other hand, it's not clear to me that HTML is extensible to the sorts of things that Evernote needs its note content to do.

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Archived

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