* Aryeh Gregor <[email protected]> [Thu, 24 Sep 2009
09:57:27 -0400]:
> Programmers rank far, far below normal people when it comes to
> usability prioritization. Programmers can use WYSIWYG just as well as
> anyone else, even if it's not as powerful as they'd like. FWIW, on
> forums I go to where I can use either BB code or WYSIWYG, I use
> WYSIWYG most of the time -- it's just more convenient. I only resort
> to BB code to work around deficiencies in the WYSIWYG editor.
>
I prefer to use BB code and rarely use forum icons. That's a matter of
personal choice.
> Even for programmers, learning a new syntax is a significant issue. A
> few months ago I spoke to a programmer I know who tried editing
> Wikipedia a few times. He got lost in the wikitext.
The only really complex part of wikitext are the templates - nested,
sometimes really weird subst and so on. I remember reading "Advanced
Templates" at meta and have the feeling I am reading something really
cryptic - I am still not good at making complex templates. Tables,
links, text formatting, images are easy to me (there were great guides
like "Advanced tables" at meta back in v1.9.3..v1.10 when I've started
to use MediaWiki). Of course it doesn't matter, because I am hardly a
representative.
> He knew he could
> figure out how to make the correction he wanted if he had to, but in
> practice, he just gave up without putting in the effort. It was too
> much of a barrier to entry to overcome his weak interest in fixing the
> error he saw.
>
Only the complex template I can think of reason.
> As far as I'm concerned, a situation in which WYSIWYG is the only
> supported editing method would be far superior to the current
> situation. If we could allow power users to edit manually, that would
> be a nice bonus. Note that even if we use a format like XML that's a
> pain to manually edit, programmers can write up their own front-ends
> if they like -- they're programmers, after all! And also note that as
> with most WYSIWYG editors, there would presumably be a slew of
> keyboard shortcuts for power users to memorize if they didn't want to
> use the mouse.
>
Maybe it should be possible to store everything in XML and "map" XML to
wikitext on the fly for these who like wikitext, and also to make future
core compatible with old bots. Eg. {| will be stored internally as
<wmf:table>.
Dmitriy
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