Provide a nicer editor rather than relying on Markdown.

Markdown is great. I love Markdown. Few people (in the wider population compromising users outside of 'open data') gets Markdown.

Two possibilities that come to mind are TinyMCE and CKEditor. Maybe something as easy as those exists that ultimately outputs Markdown (or the HTML from those editors can be converted to Markdown server-side to avoid the security and other issues with straight-up up HTML)

If CKAN still has a dep on LXML (can't remember) it should also be possible to use the clean functionality in there to remove anything dangerous. It's pretty flexible.

somewhere we've had a discussion on this, but I can't remember where. Something like CKEditor seems a good call, in my view.

I support this idea. Markdown is fine, but not enough. Things as simple as change font color turn tedious.

Here is a pure JS markdown editor I've used before all that's required is the script in the header to load the minified js and css, load the editor and ref the textbox with a div tag

https://github.com/NextStepWebs/simplemde-markdown-editor

While a better editor would be very welcome please keep in mind that its output is often reused in other contexts, for example when exporting a dataset elsewhere. It would therefore be nice to keep using a common format which is OK to read in raw form (like Markdown). If something else is chosen then I would suggest we also add a metadata field which describes the format, e.g. description_format: "markdown".