Software design question - uploading Word docs or using markdown?

I've got an asp website that currently has students copying and pasting from Word into a textarea and submitting a paper that way. In this case, they can't do any formatting.

Instructors pull up the students' work and apply html spans and styles to it as commentary.

We've thought about going to a system where the student uploads a Word doc and the instructor makes comments within the doc and uploads it back开发者_开发问答 for the student to view.

Would it make more sense to keep the system as a paste operation and maybe provide some markdown or rich text controls? I'm wondering about compatibility/virus/formatting/size issues with Word making it difficult to upload/download/store.

Yeah - this is a design question.. ;)

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As a users I can tell you that it's easier to have Word upload feature. Copy and paste is a little of trouble and users tend to want it the easy ways.

On the other side, instructors are also your users, so what I would do for the instructors is create web-based application that parse out Word document to a WYSIWYG rich text editor for editing or make commentary. In addition, instructors also have option to download the Word document and edit them on local computer and upload it back to your application.

It's a little of work but I am sure both users (students and instructors) would like it. You can start by working on students' Word upload feature and move on to insturctors'.

If you worry about formatting and compatibility of Word, from my experience, if the code parse the Word document right you should not have formatting and compatibility issues.