Re: [Wikitech-l] WikiCreole (was Re: What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG))

[George Herbert]

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 11:42 PM, Dmitriy Sintsov  wrote:
> * Brion Vibber  [Tue, 4 Jan 2011 13:39:28 -0800]:
>> On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 1:27 PM, Dirk Riehle  wrote:
>> Wikis started out as *very* lightly formatted plaintext. The point was
>> to be
>> fast and easy -- in the context of web browsers which only offered
>> plaintext
>> editing, lightweight markup for bold/italics and a standard convention
>> for
>> link naming was about as close as you could get to WYSIWYG / WYSIYM.
>>
>>
> It is still faster to type link address in square brackets than clicking
> "add link" icon then typing the link name or selecting it from a
> drop-down list. Even '' is a bit faster than Ctrl+I (italics via the
> mouse will be even slower than that).

This exercise is not about making it easier for us, those who have
already run smack out onto the long statistical tail in terms of
mastery of MediaWiki editing.

Yes, it would be nice if we preserve a geezers-mode for those of us
who know shortcut methods.  Adoption rate of new tools among existing
userbase is a major issue with any changes; if we lose too many of the
existing crowd due to a change then it takes us many years worth of
newbie friendlyness to regain the losses during the conversion.  But
we should not hamstring thinking about how non-tech people would or
could use the project by thinking in terms of geezers-mode.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herb...@gmail.com

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Re: [Wikitech-l] WikiCreole (was Re: What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG))

[Jay Ashworth]

- Original Message -
> From: "Brion Vibber" 

> A good document structure would allow useful editing for both simple
> paragraphs and complex features like tables and templates even on such
> primitive devices, by giving a dedicated editing interface the
> information it needs to address individual paragraphs, template
> parameters, table cells, etc.

A 'dedicated editing interface' is the canonical counter example to my 
#1 fundamental tenet of program and systems design: "Get The Glue Right".

The Right Glue, in this case, is bare HTML, which can be run nearly 
everywhere these days.

> I would go so far as to say that this sort of fallback interface would
> in fact be far superior to editing a big blob of wikitext on a small cell
> phone screen -- finding the bit you want to edit in a huge paragraph full of
> references and image thumbnails is pretty dreadful at the best of
> times.

Of course it would.

But the target audience here isn't people who *have* anything else; it's
people in the Sudan.  Well, the target audience I see from up here at 43,000 
feet.

Cheers,
-- jra

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Re: [Wikitech-l] WikiCreole (was Re: What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG))

[Alex Brollo]

2011/1/5 Dmitriy Sintsov 

>
> Let's hope that wikitext won't be completely abandoned in MediaWiki 2.0.
> Dmitriy
>
>
There's plenty of js running (some, not so useful IMHO); a js optional
routine to convert on the fly underlying, machine-oriented, well formed code
(XML?) into "old" wikitext when editing pages  could be built IMHO. This
will run into a long series of cases... in specific  situations/syntaxes
hard troubles will be found: well, those cases are precisely where wikitext
is not well formed and where some work is needed to think and think again;
since they are THE troubles of wikitext.

Alex
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Re: [Wikitech-l] WikiCreole (was Re: What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG))

[Alex Brollo]

2011/1/4 Brion Vibber :

>
>
> Indeed, Google Docs has an optimized editing UI for Android and iOS
> that focuses precisely on making it easy to make a quick change to a
> paragraph in a document or a cell in a spreadsheet (with concurrent
> editing).
>
>
> http://www.intomobile.com/2010/11/17/mobile-edit-google-docs-android-iphone-ipad/
>


A little bit of OT: try the new image vector image editor of Google Docs; it
exports images into svg format, and I found it excellent to build such
images and to upload them into Commons.


Now a "free roaming thought" about templates, just to share an exotic idea.
The main issue of template syntax, is casual, free, unpredictable mixture of
 attributes and contents into template parameters. It's necessary, IMHO,  to
convert them into somehow "well  formed structures" so that content could
pulled out from the template code. This abstract structure could be this
one:
{{template name begin|param1|param2|...}}
  {{optional content 1 begin}}
   text 1
  {{optional content 1 end}}
  {{optional content 2 begin}}
   text 2
  {{optional content 2 end}}
   .
  {{template name end}}

Alex
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Re: [Wikitech-l] WikiCreole (was Re: What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG))

[Dmitriy Sintsov]

* Brion Vibber  [Tue, 4 Jan 2011 13:39:28 -0800]:
> On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 1:27 PM, Dirk Riehle  wrote:
> Wikis started out as *very* lightly formatted plaintext. The point was
> to be
> fast and easy -- in the context of web browsers which only offered
> plaintext
> editing, lightweight markup for bold/italics and a standard convention
> for
> link naming was about as close as you could get to WYSIWYG / WYSIYM.
>
>
It is still faster to type link address in square brackets than clicking 
"add link" icon then typing the link name or selecting it from a 
drop-down list. Even '' is a bit faster than Ctrl+I (italics via the 
mouse will be even slower than that).

> As browsers have modernised and now offer pretty decent rich-text
> editing in
> native HTML, web apps can actually make use of that to provide
> formatting &
> embedding of images and other structural elements. In this context, 
why
> should we spend more than 10 seconds thinking about how to devise a
> syntax
> for links or tables? We already have a perfectly good language for 
this
> stuff, which is machine-parseable: HTML. (Serialize it as XML to make 
it
> even more machine-friendly!)
>
> If the web browsers of 1995 had had native HTML editing, I rather
> suspect
> there would never have been series-of-single-quotes to represent 
italics
> and
> bold...
>
Native HTML usually is a horrible bloat of tags, their attributes and 
css styles. Not really a well-readable and easily processable thing. 
Even XML, processed via XSLT would be much more compact and better 
readable. HTML is poor at separating of semantics and presentation. HTML 
also invites page editor to abuse all of these features, while wikitext 
encourages the editor to concentrate the efforts on the quality of 
content.
Let's hope that wikitext won't be completely abandoned in MediaWiki 2.0.
Dmitriy

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Re: [Wikitech-l] WikiCreole (was Re: What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG))

[Erik Moeller]

2011/1/4 Brion Vibber :
> A good document structure would allow useful editing for both simple
> paragraphs and complex features like tables and templates even on such
> primitive devices, by giving a dedicated editing interface the information
> it needs to address individual paragraphs, template parameters, table cells,
> etc.

Indeed, Google Docs has an optimized editing UI for Android and iOS
that focuses precisely on making it easy to make a quick change to a
paragraph in a document or a cell in a spreadsheet (with concurrent
editing).

http://www.intomobile.com/2010/11/17/mobile-edit-google-docs-android-iphone-ipad/

-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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Re: [Wikitech-l] WikiCreole (was Re: What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG))

[Rob Lanphier]

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 1:39 PM, Brion Vibber  wrote:
> Exactly my point -- spending time tinkering with
> sortof-human-readable-but-not-powerful-enough syntax distracts from thinking
> about what needs to be *described* in the data... which is the important
> thing needed when devising an actual storage or interchange format.

Below is an outline, which I've also posted to mediawiki.org[1] for
further iteration.  There's a lot of different moving parts, and I
think one thing that's been difficult about this conversation is that
different people are interested in different parts.  I know a lot of
people on this list are already overwhelmed or just sick of this
conversation, so maybe if some of us break off in an on-wiki
discussion, we might actually be able to make some progress without
driving everyone else nuts.  Optimistically, we might make some
progress, but the worst case scenario is that we'll at least have
documented many of the issues so that we don't have to start from zero
the next time the topic comes up.

Here's the pieces of the conversation that I'm seeing:
1.  Goals:  what are we trying to achieve?
*  Tool interoperability
**  Alternative parsers
**  GUIs
**  Real-time editing (ala Etherpad)
*  Ease of editing raw text
*  Ease of structuring the data
*  Template language with fewer squirrelly brackets
*  Performance
*  Security
*  What else?

2.  Abstract format:  regardless of syntax, what are we trying to express?
*  Currently, we don't have an abstract format; markup just maps to a
subset of HTML (so perhaps the HTML DOM is our abstract format)
*  What subset of HTML do we use?
*  What subset of HTML do we need?
*  What parts of HTML do we *not* want to allow in any form?
*  What parts of HTML do we only want to allow in limited form (e.g.
only safely generated from some abstract format)
*  Is the HTML DOM sufficiently abstract, or do we want/need some
intermediate conceptual format?
*  Is browser support for XML sufficiently useful to try to rely on that?
*  Will it be helpful to expose the abstract format in any way

3.  Syntax:  what syntax should we store (and expose to users)?
*  Should we store some serialization of the abstract format instead of markup?
*  Is hand editing of markup a viable long term strategy?
*  How important is having something expressible with BNF?
*  Is XML viable as an editing format?  JSON?  YAML?

4.  Tools (e.g. WYSIWYG)
*  Do our tool options get better if we fix up the abstract format and syntax?
*  Tools:
**  Wikia WYSIWYG editor
**  Magnus Manske's new thing
**  Line-by-line editing
list goes on...

5.  Infrastructure: how would one support mucking around with the data?
*  Support for per-wiki data formats?
*  Support for per-page data formats?
*  Support for per-revision data formats?
*  Evolve existing syntax with no infrastructure changes?

[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:RobLa-WMF/2011-01_format_discussion

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Re: [Wikitech-l] WikiCreole (was Re: What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG))

[Brion Vibber]

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 8:53 PM, Jay Ashworth  wrote:

> - Original Message -
> > From: "Brion Vibber" 
>
> > Requiring people to do all their document creation at this level is
> > like asking people to punch binary ASCII codes into cards by hand -- it's
> > low-level grunt work that computers can handle for us. We have
> > keyboards and monitors to replace punchcards; not only has this let most
> people stop
> > worrying about memorizing ASCII code points, it's let us go beyond
> > fixed-width ASCII text (a monitor emulating a teletype, which was
> > really a friendlier version of punch cards) to have things like
> _graphics_.
> > Text can be in different sizes, different styles, and different
> languages. We
> > can see pictures; we can draw pictures; we can use colors and shapes to
> create
> > a far richer, more creative experience for the user.
>
> None of which will be visible on phones from my Blackberry on down, which,
> IIRC, make up more than 50% of the Internet access points on the planet.
>
> Minimalism is your friend; I can presently *edit* wikipedia on that BB,
> with no CSS, JS, or images.  That's A Good Thing.
>

A good document structure would allow useful editing for both simple
paragraphs and complex features like tables and templates even on such
primitive devices, by giving a dedicated editing interface the information
it needs to address individual paragraphs, template parameters, table cells,
etc.

I would go so far as to say that this sort of fallback interface would in
fact be far superior to editing a big blob of wikitext on a small cell phone
screen -- finding the bit you want to edit in a huge paragraph full of
references and image thumbnails is pretty dreadful at the best of times.

-- brion
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Re: [Wikitech-l] WikiCreole (was Re: What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG))

[Jay Ashworth]

- Original Message -
> From: "Brion Vibber" 

> Requiring people to do all their document creation at this level is
> like asking people to punch binary ASCII codes into cards by hand -- it's
> low-level grunt work that computers can handle for us. We have
> keyboards and monitors to replace punchcards; not only has this let most 
> people stop
> worrying about memorizing ASCII code points, it's let us go beyond
> fixed-width ASCII text (a monitor emulating a teletype, which was
> really a friendlier version of punch cards) to have things like _graphics_.
> Text can be in different sizes, different styles, and different languages. We
> can see pictures; we can draw pictures; we can use colors and shapes to create
> a far richer, more creative experience for the user.

None of which will be visible on phones from my Blackberry on down, which,
IIRC, make up more than 50% of the Internet access points on the planet.

Minimalism is your friend; I can presently *edit* wikipedia on that BB,
with no CSS, JS, or images.  That's A Good Thing.

Cheers,
-- jra

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Re: [Wikitech-l] WikiCreole (was Re: What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG))

[Daniel Kinzler]

On 04.01.2011 22:39, Brion Vibber wrote:
>> In order to have a visual editor or three, combined with a plain text
>> editor, combined with some fancy other editor we have yet to invent, you
>> will still need that specification that tells you what a valid wiki instance
>> is. This is the core data; only if you have a clear spec of that can you
>> have tool and UI innovation on top of that.
> 
> 
> Exactly my point -- spending time tinkering with
> sortof-human-readable-but-not-powerful-enough syntax distracts from thinking
> about what needs to be *described* in the data... which is the important
> thing needed when devising an actual storage or interchange format.

Perhaps we should stop thinking about "formats" and start thinking about the
document model. Spec an (extensible) WikiDOM, let people knock themselves out
with different syntaxes to describe/create it. The "native" format could be
serialized php objects for all I care.

-- daniel

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Re: [Wikitech-l] WikiCreole (was Re: What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG))

[Brion Vibber]

On Jan 4, 2011 1:54 PM, "David Gerard"  wrote:
>
> On 4 January 2011 21:39, Brion Vibber  wrote:
>
> > If the web browsers of 1995 had had native HTML editing, I rather
suspect
> > there would never have been series-of-single-quotes to represent italics
and
> > bold...
>
>
> ... They did. Netscape Gold was the version *most* people used, and it
> even had a WYSIWYG HTML editor built in.

As a separate tool to edit standalone HTML files yes. As a widget integrated
into web pages and controllable via scripting, no.

-- brion
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Re: [Wikitech-l] WikiCreole (was Re: What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG))

[David Gerard]

On 4 January 2011 21:39, Brion Vibber  wrote:

> If the web browsers of 1995 had had native HTML editing, I rather suspect
> there would never have been series-of-single-quotes to represent italics and
> bold...


... They did. Netscape Gold was the version *most* people used, and it
even had a WYSIWYG HTML editor built in.


- d.

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Re: [Wikitech-l] WikiCreole (was Re: What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG))

[Brion Vibber]

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 1:27 PM, Dirk Riehle  wrote:

>
>  As long as we're hung up on details of the markup syntax, it's going to be
>> very very hard to make useful forward motion on things that are actually
>> going to enhance the capabilities of the system and put creative power in
>> the hands of the users.
>>
>> Forget about syntax -- what do we want to *accomplish*?
>>
>
> I think you got this sideways. The concrete syntax doesn't matter, but the
> abstract syntax does. Without a clear specification no competing parsers, no
> interoperability, no decoupling APIs, no independently evolving components.
>
> (Abstract syntax here means "XML representation" or structured
> representation or DOM tree i.e. an abstract syntax tree. But for that you
> need a language i.e. Wikitext specification and an implementation of a
> parser as of today doesn't do the job.)

[snip]

> In order to have a visual editor or three, combined with a plain text
> editor, combined with some fancy other editor we have yet to invent, you
> will still need that specification that tells you what a valid wiki instance
> is. This is the core data; only if you have a clear spec of that can you
> have tool and UI innovation on top of that.


Exactly my point -- spending time tinkering with
sortof-human-readable-but-not-powerful-enough syntax distracts from thinking
about what needs to be *described* in the data... which is the important
thing needed when devising an actual storage or interchange format.

Wikis started out as *very* lightly formatted plaintext. The point was to be
fast and easy -- in the context of web browsers which only offered plaintext
editing, lightweight markup for bold/italics and a standard convention for
link naming was about as close as you could get to WYSIWYG / WYSIYM.


As browsers have modernised and now offer pretty decent rich-text editing in
native HTML, web apps can actually make use of that to provide formatting &
embedding of images and other structural elements. In this context, why
should we spend more than 10 seconds thinking about how to devise a syntax
for links or tables? We already have a perfectly good language for this
stuff, which is machine-parseable: HTML. (Serialize it as XML to make it
even more machine-friendly!)

If the web browsers of 1995 had had native HTML editing, I rather suspect
there would never have been series-of-single-quotes to represent italics and
bold...

-- brion
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Re: [Wikitech-l] WikiCreole (was Re: What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG))

[Dirk Riehle]

> As long as we're hung up on details of the markup syntax, it's going to be
> very very hard to make useful forward motion on things that are actually
> going to enhance the capabilities of the system and put creative power in
> the hands of the users.
>
> Forget about syntax -- what do we want to *accomplish*?

I think you got this sideways. The concrete syntax doesn't matter, but the 
abstract syntax does. Without a clear specification no competing parsers, no 
interoperability, no decoupling APIs, no independently evolving components.

(Abstract syntax here means "XML representation" or structured representation 
or DOM tree i.e. an abstract syntax tree. But for that you need a language 
i.e. Wikitext specification and an implementation of a parser as of today 
doesn't do the job.)

> worrying about memorizing ASCII code points, it's let us go beyond
> fixed-width ASCII text (a monitor emulating a teletype, which was really a
> friendlier version of punch cards) to have things like _graphics_. Text can
> be in different sizes, different styles, and different languages. We can see
> pictures; we can draw pictures; we can use colors and shapes to create a far
> richer, more creative experience for the user.
>
> GUIs didn't come about from a better, more universal way of encoding text --
> Unicode came years after GUI conventions were largely standardized in
> practice.

In order to have a visual editor or three, combined with a plain text editor, 
combined with some fancy other editor we have yet to invent, you will still 
need that specification that tells you what a valid wiki instance is. This is 
the core data; only if you have a clear spec of that can you have tool and UI 
innovation on top of that.

Cheers,
Dirk

-- 
Website: http://dirkriehle.com - Twitter: @dirkriehle
Ph (DE): +49-157-8153-4150 - Ph (US): +1-650-450-8550


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Re: [Wikitech-l] WikiCreole (was Re: What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG))

[Dirk Riehle]

>> (Note that I think any conversation about parser changes should consider
>> the GoodPractices page from http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/GoodPractices.)
>>
>> If nothing else, perhaps there would be some use for the EBNF grammar
>> that was developed for WikiCreole.
>> http://dirkriehle.com/2008/01/09/an-ebnf-grammar-for-wiki-creole-10/
>
> WikiCreole used to not be parsable by a grammar, either. And it has
> inconsistencies like "italic is // unless it appears in a url".
> Good to see they improved.

WikiCreole only had a prose specification, hence it was ambiguous. Our syntax 
definition improved that so that in theory (and practice) you could now have 
multiple competing parser implementations. The issue with WikiCreole now is 
that it is simply too small---lots of stuff that it can't do but that any wiki 
engine will want.

The real reason why to care about a precise specification (that is not, as in 
the case of Mediawiki, simply the implementation), is the option to evolve 
faster. The real paper for this is 
http://dirkriehle.com/2008/07/19/a-grammar-for-standardized-wiki-markup/ - 
wouldn't it be nice if we could be innovating on a wiki platform?

Cheers,
Dirk


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Re: [Wikitech-l] WikiCreole (was Re: What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG))

[Brion Vibber]

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 12:03 PM, Mark A. Hershberger wrote:

> Perhaps this is where we can cooperate more with other Wiki writers to
> develop a common Wiki markup.  From my brief perusal of efforts, it
> looks like there is a community of developers involved in
>  but MediaWiki involvement is lacking
> (http://bit.ly/hYoki3 — for a email from 2007(!!) quoting Tim Starling).
>

We poked a bit at the early days of the WikiCreole project, but never really
saw it as something that would solve any of the problems that MediaWiki had.
I was at the meeting at WikiSym 2006 in Denmark where some of the creole
syntax bits got hammered out, and if anything that helped convince me that
it wasn't going to do us good to continue on that path.

As long as we're hung up on details of the markup syntax, it's going to be
very very hard to make useful forward motion on things that are actually
going to enhance the capabilities of the system and put creative power in
the hands of the users.

Forget about syntax -- what do we want to *accomplish*?

Requiring people to do all their document creation at this level is like
asking people to punch binary ASCII codes into cards by hand -- it's
low-level grunt work that computers can handle for us. We have keyboards and
monitors to replace punchcards; not only has this let most people stop
worrying about memorizing ASCII code points, it's let us go beyond
fixed-width ASCII text (a monitor emulating a teletype, which was really a
friendlier version of punch cards) to have things like _graphics_. Text can
be in different sizes, different styles, and different languages. We can see
pictures; we can draw pictures; we can use colors and shapes to create a far
richer, more creative experience for the user.

GUIs didn't come about from a better, more universal way of encoding text --
Unicode came years after GUI conventions were largely standardized in
practice.

-- brion
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Re: [Wikitech-l] WikiCreole (was Re: What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG))

[Platonides]

Mark A. Hershberger wrote:
> Perhaps this is where we can cooperate more with other Wiki writers to
> develop a common Wiki markup.  From my brief perusal of efforts, it
> looks like there is a community of developers involved in
>  but MediaWiki involvement is lacking
> (http://bit.ly/hYoki3 — for a email from 2007(!!) quoting Tim Starling).
> 
> (Note that I think any conversation about parser changes should consider
> the GoodPractices page from http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/GoodPractices.)
> 
> If nothing else, perhaps there would be some use for the EBNF grammar
> that was developed for WikiCreole.
> http://dirkriehle.com/2008/01/09/an-ebnf-grammar-for-wiki-creole-10/

WikiCreole used to not be parsable by a grammar, either. And it has
inconsistencies like "italic is // unless it appears in a url".
Good to see they improved.


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[Wikitech-l] WikiCreole (was Re: What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG))

[Mark A. Hershberger]

Alex Brollo  writes:

> Just a brief comment: there's no need of seaching for "a perfect wiki
> syntax", since it exists: it's the present model of well formed markup, t.i.
> xml.

And, from your answer, we can see that you mean “perfectly
understandable to parsers”, but sacrifices human usability.  XML is
notoriously difficult to produce by hand.

Suppose there was some mythical “perfect” markup.

We wouldn't want to sacrifice the usability of simple Wiki markup — it
would need to be something that could be picked up quickly (wiki-ly) by
people.  After all, if your perfect markup start barfing up XML parser
errors whenever someone created not-so-well-formed XML, well, that
wouldn't feel very “wiki”, would it?

From what I've seen of this iteration of this conversation, it looks
like people are most concerned with markup that is easy and unambiguous
to parse.

While I understand the importance of unambiguous markup or syntax for
machines, I think human-centered attributes such as “learn-ability” are
paramount.

Perhaps this is where we can cooperate more with other Wiki writers to
develop a common Wiki markup.  From my brief perusal of efforts, it
looks like there is a community of developers involved in
 but MediaWiki involvement is lacking
(http://bit.ly/hYoki3 — for a email from 2007(!!) quoting Tim Starling).

(Note that I think any conversation about parser changes should consider
the GoodPractices page from http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/GoodPractices.)

If nothing else, perhaps there would be some use for the EBNF grammar
that was developed for WikiCreole.
http://dirkriehle.com/2008/01/09/an-ebnf-grammar-for-wiki-creole-10/



-- 
http://hexmode.com/

War begins by calling for the annihilation of the Other,
but ends ultimately in self-annihilation.


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