that brings up a good point...I like how perlmonks is set up where if you need any sort of formatting you need to do it yourself. However, i feel it convenient to have a WYSIWYG editor to be able to implement proper formatting without having to code everything. This is somewhat straying away from the subject, but i feel as a developer, if you know what you need, why spend time coding it by hand, introducing the potential for erroneous code when you could click a button and put in a few attributes and have it perfect every time? this isn't saying that yes, people that don't have a clue about HTML should be able to do HTML involved things, but I think it's nice like I said to be able to have something else to do the tedious busy work.

downvote if this is too off topic, don't get me wrong, jeffa brings up a great point, but i think a certain degree of "laziness" is nice for speed.