Hi Jeremy, thanks for you answers. > There is no question in my mind of losing wikitext. > > My personal belief is that wikitext is a beautiful tool, and a > fundamental advance in how we think about formatting, moving it from > the domain of popup windows and toolbars and into the domain of things > you can type. I love that wikitext elevates links to be part of the > punctuation, and as a result I see people using wikitext using linking > much more densely and usefully.
Yes well naturally I don't know yet what the HTML is going to look like. If writing html involves writing <p>paragraphs</p> and <br/> line breaks, and if creating lists involve wrapping stuff in <ul> and <li>, and if tables involve writing <table> and <tr> and <td>, then clearly it is not an advance at all. It might be a solid idea that the user is able to combine HTML and wikitext in the same tiddlers, but wouldn't this add to the complexity? Your wysiwyg editor is going to have to support both html and wikitext, if that is the case. > First, as you note, TW5 will support wiki text directly, and will > support plugins for rendering other wiki formats. Seems like a good thing. Take care though that are not losing interopability because people are going to combine all sorts of markup and possibly lose sight of what is the default code. > and macro refreshing remains, as it has always > been, a DOM operation, not a text processing operation. Okay.. I don't know what you mean by macro refreshing though. > Secondly, my objective with the WYSIWYG editor is to be able to bring > the best of wikitext to wysiwyg. How does it still involve wikitext then? > As you can see if you switch a > tiddler in the TW5 demo to edit mode, the macros are represented as > proxy elements that can (eventually) be typed, dragged and dropped and > so on, treated as if they were characters in the text flow of the > tiddler. So it won't be necessarily to invoke some funky little pull > down menu to select a macro, you'll be able to just type it, and the > editor will automatically macro-ize it. This is a very cool thing indeed. I'm not at all opposed to wysiwyg. I think it is a great advancement. > I'm not sure why you're against being able to edit the HTML directly > as well as using the WYSIWYG editor. I'm not against being able to edit the HTML, I'm against editing (writing) HTML in the first place. I want to be able to switch between pure wikitext and the wysiwyg editor. Depending on the format of the html we would have to write - if it is anything like editing a normal html page - I wouldn't be using it. Yes, now and then. When needed. Personally, if I am given the choice between HTML and WYSIWYG, I will choose wysiwyg most of the time. This is, if I have some long document to write, I will use a wysiwyg editor and not a text editor. But given the choice between WYSIWYG and wikitext, then I will choose wikitext at any time! Especially if my editor supported dragging and dropping images, or including image links through a dialog box. So I'm not against wysiwyg, and I'm not against being able to write the HTML, I'm against writing HTML //as a language for markup.// It's not clear to me how you would combine html and wikitext in the same tiddlers. Or how you would have plugins that support both. You don't need html for wysiwyg, that's my point. > For me the key driver wasn't search engines, but rather the > observation, again and again, that the lack of WYSIWYG editing is an > obstacle to people trying out TiddlyWiki. That's a solid observation, and a solid reason for implementing wysiwyg. > The way that other applications resolve this is to have client side > code that looks at the referrer, and detects the search engine search > string, and then does a TiddlyWiki search for the same search term. I > believe there is a classic TiddlyWiki plugin that does this, too. Okay, fair enough. > Plugins will indeed have to be rewritten for TW5. Hence the discussion > about striking a balance between backwards compatibility, and the > opportunities offered by breaking it. Rewriting plugins is also a sacrifice I would make. Some of it will be easier because many existing plugins would start using jQuery properly. (Another language to learn :P). I'm looking forward to your new architecture, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed whether I can still keep using wikitext properly. ~Xen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWikiDev" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywikidev?hl=en.
